Chapter 102: The Ledger
The defence statement was due on the Friday. It is a short document that decides a great deal.
It sets out in numbered paragraphs what the defence case is going to be.
You cannot change your mind later without the jury being told.
Achterberg drafted it. Ruth read it down the phone at eight, because I could not get to her office and back inside a shift.
Paragraph one: the defendant admits the throw.
That word, admits, sat in my chest for the rest of the day.
Paragraph two: the defendant acted in lawful self-defence, the complainant having taken hold of her clothing at the neck and pulled downward.
Paragraph three: the force used was reasonable and was in fact the least injurious response available to a person with her training.
Paragraph four was the one we had been arguing about for three weeks.
It said the defendant would rely on evidence of the conduct of the complainant and of Margot Ashford towards her during the marriage.
“Last chance,” Ruth said. “I take four out, the trial gets shorter, and you look less like a woman with a history.”
“And if it stays in?”
“Then we run the three years, and the Crown gets to say every unkind thing three years will carry.”
I was at the sink with the phone against my ear and my palm flat on the cold enamel.
Eleven times. I had the dates. I had never once said them aloud to anybody who could write them down.
“Leave it in,” I said.
That evening I made the ledger, because my mother wrote down what things cost and I am her daughter.
Room: gone. The new one is worse by a bathroom and cheaper by four hundred a year.
Volunteer registration: suspended. Willow Bank: barred.
Car: gone in January, which was not the refusal.
The financial settlement: withdrawn. Ruth's estimate of what I had walked away from was between nineteen and thirty-one thousand pounds.
That number is in the ledger in my handwriting with a line under it.
I want to be accurate here, because people are sentimental about women who turn down money.
I did not refuse it because money is dirty. I refused it because of the second document.
If they had offered me thirty-one thousand pounds and no gag I would have taken it that afternoon and asked for a receipt.
Costs not yet incurred: a conviction. Up to two years and six months. The rest of my life explaining a second entry instead of one.
Then I wrote the other column. Two lines.
Twenty-seven medication records.
Twenty-two people still alive.
I put the pen down. A ledger with money in one column and people in the other is an argument with yourself, and I knew the answer.
Tobias rang at nine.
He is fifty-five and rings the way men of that generation ring: business stated in the first eight words.
“Thursdays. Half seven to nine. Small hall. You take the beginners' warm-up and nothing else.”
“Tobias.”
“It isn't charity. Suki's at her sister's from April and I need hands.”
“I have a trial on the twelfth.”
“Then you have five Thursdays.”
I said what I had said since October: that I could not stand in a hall full of children while charged with hurting a man.
He said, correctly, that a warm-up is not coaching, that he would be in the room throughout, and that he had already telephoned the governing body.
They told him it was his club, his risk assessment, and his name on the form.
“So it's your name,” I said.
“It's been my name since ninety-four.”
I did four of the five Thursdays. I will come back to the fifth.
The acknowledgment came on the Monday, on day nineteen of twenty, at 16:41.
It was addressed to Priya. She photographed it and sent it to me while I was on my break.
Four lines. Thank you for the information provided. We do not comment on whether or when we inspect. We may not be able to update you on any outcome.
Priya's message under it said: this is exactly what a real one looks like.
Mine said: it's four lines.
Hers said: four lines with a reference number and a named team. I have sent eleven in my career and had two acknowledged.
I read it three times leaning against a cage of wet sheets.
The laundry runs at thirty-two degrees on the floor in March, and the sheets come out of the washers ninety kilos to a cage.
You move a cage with your hips, not your arms. Everybody who lasts a month works that out.
I worked it out in the first hour, the only use eighteen years of judo had been to me since December.
I put the phone in my locker and went back to the cage.
Nine days later, at twenty to seven in the morning, three people from the Commission walked into Willow Bank without an appointment.