Chapter 54: Nine Minutes
The Crown Court on Marsh Road is a brown building from 1974 with a flat roof and a queue outside it from half past eight.
I was told to attend at ten. Ruth said we would be called when we were called, and that nobody who works in that building has ever once apologised for it.
Security is a table, a scanner arch, and two officers.
You put your belt and your keys in a grey tray.
The woman who patted me down did it properly, which I appreciated, because most of them do not and it makes the whole thing feel like theatre.
She asked me to lift my arms.
I lifted the left one to shoulder height and the right one to about here, which is roughly the height of a coat pocket, and she said fine, love, that's fine, and moved on.
Inside there is a hall with grey carpet tiles and eleven rows of blue chairs bolted in fours.
A screen on the wall lists the courts and the cases. Mine said: VOLKOV, N. — Court 3 — Not before 10:00.
It stayed saying that until two o'clock.
I have waited in a lot of rooms.
Call rooms at tournaments are worse, because in a call room everybody is warm and nobody can sit down.
Here everybody sat down.
That was the difference.
Everybody in that hall was sitting down and going cold.
I counted the carpet tiles between my feet and the door to Court 3.
Nineteen.
Ruth arrived at half eleven with a wheeled case and apologised for a listing in another building, and I said it was fine, and it was.
At two fourteen an usher opened the door and said my name wrong and I stood up.
Court 3 is smaller than people expect.
Nine metres by seven.
The judge is up three steps. The dock is glass on three sides and there is a bench in it that is deliberately hard.
An officer sat behind me with his knees apart and his hands on them, and he yawned twice in nine minutes.
I was asked to stand and confirm my name.
“Nadia Volkov.”
Date of birth.
I gave it.
The judge, who was about sixty and had a cold, said good afternoon to counsel and then nobody spoke to me again for nine minutes.
They spoke about me continuously.
They said the defence had served a basis of plea. They said the Crown had it under consideration and expected to accept it.
They said a plea hearing could be listed.
They discussed the twenty-second of April, and a diary conflict, and settled on the twenty-second of April.
They discussed whether a pre-sentence report should be ordered now to save time, and agreed that it should, and neither of them looked round.
The judge said he would order one.
He said the defendant should cooperate with probation.
Ruth stood up and said thank you, Your Honour.
I said one more word in that room.
The usher told me I could sit and I said yes.
Three words in total: my name, my date of birth, and yes.
Nine minutes.
There was a young man in the press seat with a spiral notebook and a phone face down on his knee. He wrote continuously for the whole nine minutes, which was more writing than the case required.
And at the back of the public gallery, in the third row, on the aisle, there was a woman in a grey wool coat with her hands folded in her lap.
Margot Ashford is sixty-six.
She sits with her spine off the back of the chair.
She taught me that, in a manner of speaking.
She did not look at me when I came in.
She looked at me once, when the date was fixed, for about a second and a half, and then looked back at the judge.
I have been looked at by a lot of people across a lot of mats and I know what most of the looks mean.
That one was not triumph.
I want to be exact.
It was closer to a person checking a level.
Outside, the steps down to Marsh Road are shallow and wet and there are eleven of them.
Ruth was behind me talking to someone. I came down alone with my coat open because I had not done it up in the building and had forgotten.
The wind on Marsh Road comes straight up from the river and it makes you set your jaw.
There was a man at the bottom of the steps in a green jacket with a phone held up at chest height.
He took four photographs.
I did not stop, and I did not turn my face away, because turning your face away is the thing they print.
I found out on the Thursday that I had chosen wrong.