A Fatal Verdict (13 page)

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Well, it would be very difficult to cut this girl’s wrists in the way we have seen if she was still conscious and actively resisting. There would be quite a fight. So I would expect to find other cuts, particularly on her arms where she tried to defend herself. But I found no such cuts, so it seems more likely that he held her underwater first until she lost consciousness. Then it would be easier to cut her wrists.’

Sarah frowned, feigning confusion. ‘But if he thought she had drowned, why would he think it necessary to cut her wrists as well?’

‘To disguise the cause of death, I suppose. To make a murder look like a suicide.’

As Sarah had half expected, Savendra rose to his feet to protest. ‘My Lord, I understood Dr Tuchman to be a pathologist, not a psychologist. He is an expert witness about the state of the victim’s body, not of the assailant’s mind - if indeed there was an assailant at all.’

The judge smiled patiently. ‘True, Mr Bhose. But Mrs Newby is asking the learned doctor to deduce from those injuries whether this was a murder or not, and if so, how it took place. You may proceed, Mrs Newby.’

Sarah suppressed a little grin as Savendra sat down. ‘So, in your expert opinion, Dr Tuchman, the murderer held his victim underwater until she lost consciousness and he believed he had drowned her, is that right? Then he cut her wrists in order to make it look like suicide.’

‘That seems the most likely explanation to me, yes.’

‘Very well.’ Sarah glanced smugly at Savendra before proceeding to her final point. The timing of David Kidd’s alibi.

‘Another suggestion the defence may raise, is that the defendant claims to have been out of the flat for ten minutes before he found her. If that is true he cannot have cut her wrists before he went out, he says, because she would have bled to death before he returned. Perhaps you can help us with this point, Dr Tuchman. With a pierced artery in her wrist, how long would it take for a person to bleed to death?’

‘I’m afraid that’s impossible to say with any accuracy. It depends on a number of factors - the victim’s age, body weight, the severity of the injury, and so on. Unfortunately, no one has carried out precise experiments to measure this sort of thing. It’s not quite ethical, you know.’

To Sarah’s horror, the pathologist attempted a thin-lipped, ironic smile. She frowned at him warningly. No death camp science, please. In her calmest voice she continued.

‘In your opinion, then, Miss Walters could still have been alive - as she was when the ambulance crew arrived - fifteen or twenty minutes after her ulnar artery was pierced?’

‘That would be possible, yes. Particularly in a case like this, where the artery was only pierced, rather than severed. It’s not like severing an artery in your neck, for example - people die almost instantaneously from that. But pressure on her wrist, or the earlier application of a tourniquet, might have stemmed the flow altogether. Unfortunately in this case, it seems, that came too late.’

‘So what is the maximum time a person might hope to survive a pierced ulnar artery in the wrist?’

The pathologist shrugged. ‘In exceptional circumstances, people have survived such injuries for half an hour. Though most of them die at that point, it has to be said.’

‘Half an hour. Thank you.’ Another  vital avenue of Savendra’s defence closed off. ‘So it is possible, then, for Mr Kidd to have cut her wrists in the way we have described, left his flat for ten minutes or so to give himself an alibi, and then returned to find Shelley Walters still faintly alive?’

‘I believe so, yes.’

‘Thank you, Dr Tuchman.’ Sarah smiled at the wiry old man gratefully. ‘If you would wait there, please. Mr Bhose may have some questions for you, perhaps.’

She folded her gown around her, smiled at Savendra quizzically, and sat down.

15. Miranda

As the plane began to lose height, the white towers of cloud came closer. The radiant pinnacles that had gleamed like arctic snow under the brilliant sunlight of the upper atmosphere gradually became more shadowed, disparate and wispy as the plane descended to their level. Then, quite suddenly, they were in the cloud itself, surrounded by grey, swirling mist, and the illusion of clarity and beauty was gone for good.

Passengers began to stir, folding their tables into the seat backs in front of them, handing last drinks to the stewardess, checking passports in wallets and handbags. As the plane swayed slightly in a crosswind the chime sounded and the instruction to fasten seatbelts came on. Nervous flyers braced themselves for the landing, others smiled at the acquaintances they had made on the trip. A murmur of anticipation filled the cabin.

None of this seemed to affect the young woman in window seat 5c. Her table had been folded for some time now, and she sat staring out of the window at the fields and roads appearing through the mist with the same fixed, unseeing attention that she had bestowed on the blue sky earlier. She seemed, the stewards had concluded, sunk in some inner world of her own, a glass bubble outside which things were scarcely noticed.

The plane landed and rolled to a stop, the passengers rose to their feet, stretching into the overhead lockers for their hand luggage and queuing to disembark when the doors opened. Still the young woman didn’t move. The businessman who had travelled beside her failed to catch her eye for a parting remark, shrugged, and shuffled away down the aisle. Only when the cabin was nearly empty did she bother to rise, heft a green shoulder bag from the locker, and follow the other passengers out, ignoring the trained farewell of the stewardess by the door.

The stewardess, who had noted the girl’s behaviour throughout the flight, raised a knowing eyebrow at her colleague. ‘Private tragedy,’ she suggested. ‘Divorce, perhaps. It gets you like that, they say.’

But it was not divorce that was haunting Miranda Ward. Her marriage to Bruce, indeed, was the best thing about her life right now. That and little Sophie, whom she had left behind for the second time in a year.

She collected her suitcase from the carousel and wheeled it through customs to the concourse where her father stood in the sea of faces awaiting arrivals. He looked tired, more drawn than last time, she thought; and the love in his eyes was mixed with the pain, the hungry desperation that had come with the death of her sister earlier this year. Miranda was the only daughter Andrew Walters had left now, his anxious gaze said; and people can die in all sorts of horrible, unforeseen ways, including on aeroplanes.

Not this time, though. She embraced him wordlessly, each hugging longer and tighter than they had ever done in her long-ago, undemonstrative childhood. Marrying an American meant that they met only rarely on carefully planned holidays, and most recently, at Shelley’s funeral. Everything had changed since then, in Miranda’s life as in her parents’. A grey mist shrouded her emotions, from which there seemed no escape. It was like being trapped in a maze with no exit, only further tests of endurance.

Like this one: leaving your husband and daughter on the far side of the ocean, to sit with your parents at the trial of your sister’s murderer.

Before Savendra stood up to cross examine, the judge adjourned court for lunch. Mark Wrass had booked a table for four in a quiet restaurant overlooking the river, but only Kathryn Walters met him and Sarah outside the court. Her husband had left half an hour ago, she explained, to meet a plane at Manchester airport.

The atmosphere on the way to the restaurant, crossing a busy road and dodging between parked cars, was awkward. Sarah did not know what to say to Kathryn, nor she to her, and both were grateful for the breezy avuncular charm of the solicitor, talking banalities and ushering the two women courteously to the upstairs room in which, mercifully, only one other table was occupied.

Once there, the menu was to be negotiated. Sarah, energized by her successful examination of the pathologist, was hungry, but saw immediately that to Kathryn the idea of food was an irrelevance. She temporized by ordering a Spanish omelette, and then, when the waiter had gone, leaned forward earnestly.

‘This must be very painful for you. I do understand that, truly.’

‘Do you?’ Kathryn looked away out of the window, her eyes brimming with tears. ‘I saw you having a good laugh about things with your colleague. Or am I wrong?’

Sarah was stunned. At first she couldn’t think who the woman meant. Then the penny dropped. She had been teasing Savendra about his weekend away with Belinda and the new bike. ‘Who? Sav ... Mr Bhose, you mean? Counsel for the defence?’

‘If that’s what you call him. The Indian in fancy dress. Having a fine laugh, you were. I thought he was on the other side.’

‘Well, he is, of course. But we’re still professional colleagues. We know each other quite well.’

‘So it’s all stitched up, is it?’ Kathryn persisted bitterly. ‘You’ve agreed tactics between you, before the trial’s even started. I wish I hadn’t come.’

‘No! Good heavens, Mrs Walters, is that what you think? Certainly not. I haven’t even discussed the case with him, as a matter of fact.’

‘Then what were you talking about down there, so cheerfully?’

Kathryn’s hands, Sarah noticed, were nervously ripping a bread roll into tiny pieces. She looked bitter, hurt, vulnerable. Sarah wondered how to answer the question. The flippant truth would only make matters worse. She chose a white lie instead.

‘His fiancee, as it happens. He’s getting married next month.’

‘Oh.’ Kathryn looked down at the mess her hands had made of the roll, then fumbled for a tissue in her bag. ‘I see. I’m sorry.’

‘I know it must look strange to people, but barristers work in a small and rather incestuous world, so we see each other all the time. But that doesn’t mean we collude with each other in court; we don’t. If I can send this man to prison, I will.’

‘Is there any chance that you will fail?’ Kathryn asked slowly.

Sarah drew a deep breath. ‘There’s always a chance of that, of course. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t. But the police have assembled a pretty strong case, and I shall lay every bit of that evidence before the jury, just as I did this morning.’ Sarah paused while the waiter brought their food. A small, ignoble part of her wondered if Kathryn might praise her for the way she had handled the pathologist’s evidence, but a look at her lined, pale face made her dismiss such vanity immediately. The trial was a matter of deadly seriousness for this woman, of course it was. That was why she was so edgy and nervous; and why, probably, most barristers chose to avoid encounters like this. Too much emotion can cloud your perception of the facts, her pupil master had once told her. There was truth in that, of course, but he was a typical middle-aged man who had learned to bury his emotions long ago at boarding school. Sarah’s background and instincts were utterly different to that.

‘What was Shelley like?’ she asked softly.

Miranda was the elder of the two sisters, dark where Shelley was fair, and the brighter too, by some incalculable throw in the genetic lottery which their parents deplored but could do nothing about. Miranda had always found schoolwork easy where Shelley frequently found difficulties; she had the perseverance to finish a task where her younger sister would scrumple it up and run outside to play; and as they became teenagers, Miranda had the ability to define a goal for herself and work steadily towards it, while Shelley fluttered from one idea to another, bewildering her family with endless new enthusiasms which blossomed and died in a day.

But these things troubled her parents more than they did Miranda. To her, Shelley was an archetypal younger sister - by turns irritating, noisy, selfish, stealing her clothes and CDs without a second’s qualm of conscience, and also funny, scatter-brained and amusingly rebellious against the rigid demands of parents and school. Sometimes she did things - like throwing custard in her father’s face or squirting superglue onto the science laboratory stools just before class - that Miranda wished she had dared to do herself. For Shelley, for all her faults, was brave - no one could deny that. Perhaps the bravery came from a certain nerveless lack of imagination, a failure to imagine the probable disastrous consequences, but it was a fine quality for all that, and one that Miranda not only envied but was indebted to for her life.

One afternoon in the long summer of their childhood, when Miranda was not yet thirteen and Shelley ten, they had gone out for a ride on their ponies together with their dog, Tess. Miranda had a spirited pony with a tendency to shy at things it took a sudden inexplicable dislike to, like a bird rustling in a hedge or a perfectly innocuous stick on a track. But both girls were good riders who treated this more as a joke than a problem. They had a picnic with them and were exploring the extensive woods near their home, a nature reserve with a disused airfield in the middle of it. They were trotting down a grassy track when, without warning, two roe deer burst out of the woods beside them, closely pursued by Tess, her tongue hanging out in excitement. Miranda’s pony panicked. It reared, throwing her violently forwards onto its neck, then spun round and took off at a flat gallop in the opposite direction, stretching its legs long and low as though all the hounds of hell were at its heels. Miranda clung on for dear life, feeling herself slipping sideways all the time because she had lost her stirrups. After a  hundred yards the track divided, and the pony sped down a track they did not know. It was a mistake. Almost immediately the track led to a sunken concrete reservoir, some relic of the airfield long ago. Seeing the water in front of it, the pony tried to stop, failed, skidded sideways on the ancient concrete, and flung Miranda headfirst into the water, cracking her head against a rusty iron post as she fell.

She remembered very little after that, and was only able to construct a picture from what people told her. The reservoir - part of the drainage system of the airfield - was the size of a small swimming pool with concrete sides two feet above the dirty water. She was unconscious when Shelley found her, floating face downwards in water as black and slimy as oil. The pony was in the water too, swimming round frantically with wide eyes and feet threshing. They were at least a mile from the nearest farm, possibly more. But Shelley didn’t hesitate. She dismounted, dived in, and managed to turn Miranda over, swimming on her back behind her and holding her chin up as they had practised at school. But there was no way out of the water. On all sides the concrete walls rose two feet above their heads, and though Shelley twice managed to reach up and grasp the edge there was no way she could haul herself up without letting go of Miranda, who was still moaning and semi-conscious.

Time passed. Shelley shouted for help but no one came. She grew wetter and colder and found it harder to keep herself and her sister afloat. The terrified pony swam round and round, bumping into them and shoving them out of its way. Their dog, Tess, barked and whined beside the reservoir, but no one seemed to hear her either. ‘I thought we were going to drown,’ Shelley told her sister later, as they stared into the black, lonely water. ‘No one would come for days, and then they’d find two girls and a pony in the mud at the bottom, like Anglo-Saxon remains.’

Even though it could easily have happened she seemed to find it partly amusing. But it wasn’t in Shelley’s nature to dwell on disaster, or indeed on anything for long. The story haunted Miranda more than it ever seemed to trouble her sister. Perhaps that was because it was so hard for her to disentangle what she remembered from what she had been told. She remembered, or seemed to remember, lying on her back in the water looking up at the trees but feeling too weak to swim or even try. Shelley had talked to her, or so she said, but the answers she got made little sense. But nevertheless Miranda had a vague idea of what happened next, made up of her own disconnected memories and things Shelley told her later.

The pony’s frantic efforts began to exhaust it so that it became more docile, and swam towards the girls hoping, perhaps, that humans would help it as they had done all its life. It was then that Shelley had her idea. Grabbing the bridle with one hand, she shoved Miranda towards the saddle with the other. ‘Go on, climb up!’ she yelled. ‘Get on his back!’ How long it took, Miranda had no idea. Time after time her feeble rubbery arms lost their grip, and the pony panicked, dragging them both away into the middle of the water, but Shelley clung on to them both and finally Miranda got her foot into the stirrup and hauled herself into the saddle. After that there was another age of splashing and floundering before Shelley managed to coax the pony to the side of the reservoir and persuade it to turn so that Miranda, with a wild desperate leap, dragged herself on shore.

She had a shameful memory of lying there, stunned and exhausted, not knowing or caring what had become of Shelley. There was a vision of pebbles in front of her face which had imprinted itself on her mind; she could see each stone clearly even today. And the dog was whining and licking her ear. But if Miranda’s mind was wandering then, Shelley’s was not. She still had hold of the pony’s bridle and eventually managed to attract her sister’s attention enough to pass her the reins and tell her to hold the animal’s head close to the side. Then Shelley, too, climbed onto the pony’s back and clambered ashore.