Chapter 105: The Twelfth of March
I was at the court at half past eight with a bag.
In the bag: toothbrush, socks, ibuprofen, a charger, and Priya's number on paper in case they took the phone.
Achterberg told me to bring it. Most people who bring it do not need it, and everybody who needs it and has not brought it remembers the day badly.
The concourse at Hallowfield has a security arch, a coffee machine, and eleven rows of blue seats bolted in fours.
I sat in the second row from the wall, facing the doors, because I have sat facing doors my whole life.
Ruth arrived at nine with a trolley case.
Achterberg arrived at twenty past, robed, carrying her wig in her hand like a bag of shopping.
At half past nine she came back from the list office and sat down beside me without ceremony.
“We're third on a floating trial,” she said. “There are two courts, and there are four cases.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we may start today, we may start tomorrow, and we may not start.”
At eleven she came back again and said the Crown had served an application the previous afternoon.
They wanted to put my conviction before the jury under two separate gateways, and they had served it eighteen days late.
“I can object. If I object and win, they may ask for time. If I object and lose, we run today with your record in and no notice.”
“What do you advise?”
“I advise you not to be tried today by a judge who is annoyed with the Crown and taking it out on the clock.”
I saw Damon at twenty past twelve.
He came through the arch with a woman from the family firm, wearing a wrist splint.
The fracture had been in December. Fifteen weeks. Styloid processes take six.
He wore it well. He held the arm slightly away from his body, the way you do for the first fortnight, not the fifteenth.
He did not look at me. He looked at the noticeboard for a long time, and the noticeboard is a laminated fire notice.
At two o'clock we were called into court for eleven minutes.
I stood in the dock and gave my name and date of birth and the usher told me to sit.
The judge was a man called Rampton with reading glasses pushed up on his head and a diary open in front of him.
He asked what had happened to the timetable. Prosecuting counsel said the word regrettably twice.
Rampton said a defendant on bail since December was entitled to expect the Crown to comply with a January direction.
He did not shout. He wrote, and the writing was the part everybody watched.
Then he turned to the diary, and the diary is the whole of the criminal justice system.
Court time. Counsel availability. A five-day estimate. Twenty-two witnesses, four of them abroad.
He offered the twenty-ninth of April, and Achterberg's clerk had her in Cardiff, and the prosecution had a fatal road traffic case.
He offered the seventeenth of June, and there was no court.
He gave us the fourteenth of October.
Seven months and two days.
He extended bail on the same conditions, asked whether I understood them, and that was the entire hearing.
Outside, Ruth said, “That was a good result.”
I looked at the bag in my hand.
“Say why,” I said, “because I need to hear it as a sentence.”
“Because your record isn't going before a jury on twenty-four hours' notice, and because in October we will have documents we do not have today.”
“And the cost of the good result is seven months.”
“Yes.”
“Say the rest.”
“Seven months on bail. Seven months barred from contacting your husband's family. Seven months telling every employer you have a trial date.”
“And seven months of being thirty-four.”
“That one I can't help with.”
I walked out through the arch, put the toothbrush back in the bag, and got the twelve past three bus.
I was on shift by half four.
I told the supervisor the court had adjourned and he said, “So you're in Thursday, then,” which was the most useful thing anybody said to me that day.
That night I unpacked the bag on the bed and put the socks back in the drawer.
I left Priya's number on the paper in the side pocket.
It is still in that bag. I have never taken it out.
Seven months is what the case cost me, and the case did not know it was costing anything.
A court diary is not a person and has never pretended to be one.
Meanwhile the other thing, the slow thing, the thing with a reference number, had gone into a filing system and stopped.
For nine weeks I heard nothing at all.
Then, on a Tuesday in May, Anisa Fenwick crossed the staff car park at Fairholme at eleven twenty at night and waited by my bike.