Chapter 73: Leverage
The offer came on a Tuesday in February, in a room above a dry cleaner.
My solicitor's office was nine feet by eleven.
I had measured it the first time I sat in it, pacing it out while she was on the phone. I do that in every room I enter. I have never decided to do it. It does itself.
Radiator under the window, painted so many times the ribs had gone soft.
Two chairs on my side of the desk. Mine had a wobble in the back left leg, so I sat forward, weight through both feet, and it stayed quiet.
Down in the shop the presses went off every ninety seconds, with a sound like a held breath being let go.
“They've written,” she said.
She turned the screen a little. Not all the way.
Solicitors do that. They let you see it and they keep hold of it.
The letter was from a firm I had not heard of before Christmas, signed by a man named Pell. Four paragraphs. The first three were about how sorry everyone was that it had reached this stage.
The fourth one was the point.
Mr. Damon Ashford was prepared, on terms, to inform the Crown Prosecution Service that he no longer supported the prosecution.
I read it twice. The second time slowly, because the first time my eyes had done that thing they do with good news, skidding.
“He can do that?”
“He can say it,” she said. “Whether it ends the case is a separate question. Read the rest.”
There was a rest. There was an attachment, and the attachment was nineteen pages.
I want to be accurate about what I felt, because later people asked and I gave them a tidier answer than the true one.
What I felt first was relief, and it came up through my legs.
That is not a figure of speech.
It arrived in the thighs, the way it used to at the end of a long randori, and my knees went loose.
I put my hands flat on my thighs to keep them still.
I know exactly why my hands went there. Three years of practice. Palms down, fingers together, on the muscle.
“Nadia.”
“I'm listening.”
“The withdrawal of a complainant's support is not the withdrawal of a charge,” she said. “The prosecution belongs to the Crown.”
“There were twenty-two people in that room,” I said.
“There are statements from six of them. If the Crown thinks it can prove the case without him, it will carry on without him.”
“Then what is he selling me?”
“That,” she said, “is the correct question. I would like you to keep asking it.”
She printed the attachment. The printer sat on a filing cabinet and took a long time, and neither of us filled the silence.
Nineteen pages, still warm at the edges, in a plastic clip.
Pages one to four were a statement of facts I was invited to agree.
They were written in the passive voice almost the whole way through.
A dress was taken hold of. A guest was caused to fall. A family gathering was disturbed.
Nowhere in four pages did a man's hand appear at the front of my collarbone with his knuckles against my skin.
Pages five to eight were an agreement not to bring any civil claim against anybody, ever, arising out of anything.
Pages nine to nineteen were about what I could say.
Eleven pages.
I counted them twice, because eleven is a number I have a bad relationship with and I wanted to be sure I had not invented it.
“That's the bulk of it,” my solicitor said. “That is most of the document.”
“Is that normal?”
“Confidentiality is normal. Non-disparagement is normal.”
“And this?”
“This is longer than normal.”
She had a yellow highlighter in her hand and had not used it, which I had learned meant she was still deciding what she thought.
Outside, the presses went off again.
I thought about how tired I was. That was a thing I had only started allowing myself to think in January.
A room above a launderette on Ferris Street, with a mattress I did not choose.
No contact, direct or indirect, with Damon Ashford or Margot Ashford. Not to attend the house at Marlow End.
A trial date in the autumn, which is a long way off until you understand that everything you do before it is the trial.
If I signed, all of it stopped.
“What do I sign?”
“Nothing today. Today you read it. All of it, including the schedule at the back, which is where people stop reading.”
“Why there?”
“Because that is where it is kept.”
She said it lightly, the way she said most things. Then she uncapped the highlighter, turned to page fourteen, drew a line under one clause, and left it there.
The clause was three lines long.
It was 9.2, and it did not mention the family at all.