Chapter 76: A Reasonable Offer
Pell telephoned my solicitor on the Friday and she told me about it on the Monday, in order, with the dates.
She always gave me the dates. She had worked out early that it settled me.
“He was pleasant,” she said. “He used the word reasonable four times.”
“Four.”
“I counted. Because you count.”
Pell had said the offer was time-limited. He had said his client wished to draw a line.
He had said that a young man's reputation had been damaged by an incident that was, in the end, a family matter.
He had also said, twice, that he understood I had personal circumstances that made a trial particularly difficult.
“That's my record,” I said.
“That's your record.”
I looked at the wall behind her, where there was a photograph of a lighthouse that had nothing to do with anything. “He's telling me he knows the jury will hear about it.”
“He's telling you he knows you know.”
There is a thing about the grip.
You do not take a sleeve because you want the sleeve. You take it because of what it stops the other person doing with the arm.
Pell had my sleeve. He had had it since December.
“Here is my advice, and it is going to sound cautious,” she said. “The offer is worth taking seriously. That is not the same as taking it.”
“Say the case.”
“You are thirty-four with an assault conviction at twenty-two. The man you threw was unconscious eleven days.”
“They can't tell a jury that.”
“They will not be allowed to lead all of it. A jury will get the shape of it.”
“And the twenty-two people.”
“Six statements. Two of them helpful to you, in a small way. Four not.”
“Julian.”
She paused before she answered, which she rarely did.
“Your husband gave a statement that is accurate and complete and contains no opinion at all,” she said. “It is the most damaging document in the file.”
I had known that since November.
Hearing it again did not make it new. It made it more solid, the way a bruise comes up.
“So a trial is a risk,” I said.
“A trial is a risk. Custody is possible. Not likely on these facts. Possible.”
“And if I sign?”
“If you sign, Pell writes to the Crown, the Crown reviews the case, and there is a decent chance it goes away in the spring. Not certain. Decent.”
“Decent.”
“I will not sell you certainty. Anybody who sells you certainty in a criminal case is either lying or new.”
Outside, a van reversed, and the beeping went on a long time and stopped. “There is one thing that bothers me,” she said, “and I want to say it out loud so it exists.”
“Go on.”
“They are asking you to give up a lot of speech in exchange for something they cannot fully deliver. They know they cannot fully deliver it. A commercial lawyer does not pay over the odds for a thing he does not want.”
“So they want the silence more than they want the trial.”
“I did not say that.”
“You did, though.”
She almost smiled, and did not, and moved the pages half an inch to the left.
I understood the shape of it on the bus, which annoyed me, because I had wanted to walk.
They were not buying an end to the case. They could not, and their own lawyer had told them so.
They were buying eleven pages.
They were buying the answer to a question nobody had asked me yet.
In language broad enough to cover a question nobody had thought of.
And they had built in a clause about a voluntary or unpaid capacity, which is not a thing you write about a wife.
It is a thing you write about a volunteer.
At home I put the pages on the laminate table and stood over them with my hands behind my back.
I did not want to touch them.
There is a rule Tobias gave me when I was thirteen and losing to a girl from Vantaa in every single practice.
He said, when someone offers you the grip you want, ask why they are offering it.
I had not thought about that sentence in twenty years. It arrived whole, in his accent, with the word grip landing wrong the way it always did.
I got the notebook I had been using for the chronology.
I turned to a clean page.
At the top I wrote: WHAT DO THEY THINK I SAW.
Then I sat there with the pen for eleven minutes and did not write a single thing under it.
Because the honest answer, that night, was nothing.
I had seen nothing. I was sure of it.
I went to bed sure of it, and I woke up at four in the morning thinking about a laminated sheet in a plastic wallet, cable-tied to the handle of a trolley.