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  Apart from that, she followed Alex’s adventures at a distance. Heard his mum and dad cursing him out – seemingly whenever they took a break from cursing each other. She knew his name was Beech because their mail lay out on the table in the hall some days, waiting to be picked up. And she got the Alex from a thousand shouted commands and reprimands.

  “You’ve got a pet,” John said the first time he saw the boy. “Did he follow you home?”

  “That’s not funny, John.”

  “I’m not laughing. Honest, Jess! I think it’s cute. What does he eat?”

  She had to admit that she didn’t know. But the next time Alex camped out on the stairs, she brought him a sandwich as well as the cocoa. “It’s cheese,” she said. “I don’t know what you think about cheese. But it’s there if you want it.”

  He seemed to think that cheese was acceptable, by and large. He ate the sandwich, apart from the crusts. And their relationship entered a new phase. Jess thought of it as comfort and supply.

  Still no talking, though. Just “How are you?”; “I’m fine.” She thought about sitting down next to him, striking up a proper conversation. So is school going well? Do you have a favourite sport? A best friend? Do your parents only shout at you or do they hit you too?

  “You want to keep your distance from that,” John warned her. “I mean it, Jess – it’s trouble you don’t need. If he tells you he’s being abused, what are you going to do? Call the police? They’ll start looking into us too, and find out we’re using. We’ll go to jail.”

  John still called Alex her little pet, but he didn’t laugh any more and there was a nasty edge to his voice when he said it. He seemed to feel that the whole thing had gone beyond a joke.

  Jess went ahead and had the talk with Alex anyway. John Street wasn’t her conscience. He was the anti-Jiminy Cricket, always egging her on to darker and crazier things. This time she decided to pretend she had a better angel.

  “Only once,” Alex said when she asked him if his dad ever got physical with his reprimands. Jess had no idea what to do with that. She suspected that one smack or punch always led on to n, where n was a large number. But it wasn’t exactly a smoking pistol. Not enough to justify an anonymous tip-off to child services, or an ugly altercation on the upstairs landing. And her batteries were low in every way that mattered. If there was a confrontation, she would almost certainly lose.

  She gave Alex her number – made him put it into his phone. “If you ever need someone,” she told him, “you can call me. Or just come down and knock on the door. I’m usually home.”

  It didn’t ever happen. And after a while she forgot about the promise – forgot she’d ever even made it. The addiction was lying like an iron bar across her brain right about then, and it was getting worse with each day that went by. Alex was one of the last things to go, but he faded out in the end along with the rest of the world. She went sailing away to a sunny, squally island where the population was three: herself, John Street and heroin.

  At first, that was as far as Jess’s memories would take her. But she kept on dipping her bucket into that deep black well and hauling up more and more details. When the psychiatrists appointed by the court to test her mental faculties asked her what she could remember, she tried her best to tell the truth, but the truth changed from one session to the next. She could see in their eyes that they thought she was faking her amnesia.

  Then her lawyer (also court-appointed, set in motion by the magic of legal aid) arrived like a fox in a henhouse and sent the psychiatrists packing. His name was Brian Pritchard. He was exactly Jess’s height, which made him quite short for a man, and grey-haired, even though he couldn’t have been more than forty-five or so. The hair read almost like a statement – of gravitas and moral rectitude. “My client isn’t ready to talk about these traumatic events,” he told the shrinks in cold, clipped tones. “And by God you’d better not try to use those assessments in court if you haven’t got a consent form to go with them!”

  But they did have a consent form. Jess was signing everything that was put in front of her, collaborating with every legal process, being as helpful as she could. That was what innocent people did, and she was sure in her heart she was innocent.

  Pritchard did not approve. “You’ve been arrested and charged,” he told her waspishly. “In an ideal world the police would still be vigorously pursuing their inquiries, but we don’t live in an ideal world, Ms Moulson. If you hand yourself to them on a plate, they will take you and pick you apart and wipe their fingers clean with the laws of evidence. And in the meantime they will not be exploring any other possibilities, because exploring other possibilities takes effort. So please, as a favour to me, treat everyone who isn’t me as your sworn enemy until your trial is over.”

  Jess glanced at the man who had accompanied Pritchard on to the ward. A skittish little junior solicitor or clerk whose role was to hand his boss pieces of paper when they were needed and who scarcely ever spoke. When Jess met his eyes, he blushed and looked away.

  “Oh, I don’t mean Mr Levine,” Pritchard said. “You can treat him as landscape.”

  On that first visit, Pritchard took Jess’s statement about the night of the fire without comment or question. On the second, the next day, he brought her some newspaper articles and printouts from internet blogs in order, so he said, to give her a better idea of what she was up against.

  Inferno Jess: “I know nothing!”

  The woman at the heart of tragic ten-year-old Alex Beech’s death is being treated at London’s Whittington Hospital both for her physical injuries and for memory loss. Yet doctors have found no evidence of brain damage or psychological trauma.

  Pritchard seemed to be trying to provoke her into some kind of response, but all Jess could give him was exhaustion and despair, occasionally peaking into dull amazement.

  “They might as well just come right out and call me a murderer!”

  “They’d be very happy to,” Pritchard said. “But they’re mindful of the sub judice laws. Most of them use the word ‘alleged’ quite liberally. Alleged murderer. Alleged crime. The magic ingredient in unfounded allegations. Some have taken to calling you ‘the Inferno Killer’, in quote marks. They have a star witness, by the way. You should brace yourself, because it’s going to get unpleasant.”

  “Who? What witness?” But she knew.

  John. John Street. Of course.

  “Don’t let that prey on your mind,” Pritchard advised her. “I think he’s their weak link, to be honest. I’m delighted that they’re leading with him. I’m sure we’ll get to the truth. Now let’s go over that statement of yours and see which parts of it are fit for purpose.”

  Not many, it turned out. Time and again the lawyer took Jess to task for stating as truth things she could only know by implication. “You were out of your head for large parts of the evening, yes? Then please don’t make assumptions about what you didn’t see and couldn’t hear. Your role here is to state the facts. Let me worry about the truth.”

  “They’re the same thing!” Jess protested, but Pritchard shook his head.

  “The facts are in the outside world. You can verify them with your senses or with objective tests. The truth is something that people build inside their heads, using the facts as raw materials. And sometimes the facts get bent or broken in the process.”

  “I’m not going to lie,” Jess said.

  “You misunderstand me. I’m not asking you to. I’m asking you to stay with the facts, where you’re on safe ground, and stop lunging off towards something dim and distant that you’re thinking of as the truth. That’s a dangerous voyage, and you shouldn’t try to make it alone.”

  Jess didn’t argue, but only because she wasn’t up to the effort. She wasn’t good for much of anything right then. Up in the facial reconstruction unit of the Whittington Hospital in Archway, surrounded by people who mostly maintained a professional deadpan, she felt like a prisoner in a tower made out of other people’s words
. Alex was dead. That little kid, who never caught a single piece of good luck in his life, was dead. And they were saying she did it.

  She couldn’t even protest her innocence. Saying you didn’t do it and saying you didn’t remember doing it were two different things. She was sure in her own mind that something else had happened. Any one out of a million something elses. Alex had fallen down the stairs. His parents had killed him and then gone looking for a scapegoat. He’d killed himself. She wandered in her mind through the maze of these possibilities – and believed in none of them, because in her mind, Alex Beech was still alive. Still keeping up his endless vigil on the stairs. Nothing else made sense to her.

  She had an unreliable temper (when was there ever an addict who didn’t?) but almost always when she got angry it was with herself. For cowardice, passivity, lack of backbone. For being so woefully short on what her Aunt Brenda (oh Brenda, I need you now!) used to call stick-to-it-iveness. True, she had hated John in recent times, and often wished him dead. But wishing without doing was exactly her speed. Surely you couldn’t become a murderer without knowing it. Maybe you could forget the act because of trauma or madness, but you couldn’t forget the intent. If it had ever been there, it would still be inside you, in your head or your heart, and a thorough search of the premises would find it.

  Jess carried out a lot of searches, came up empty and went into the trial still believing in herself.

  Over the space of two weeks, that belief was inexorably demolished.

  3

  These were the facts, which the prosecution established in a brisk and businesslike manner. There had been a fire. In Jess’s flat, which was number 16 Orchard Court, Colney Hatch Lane, Muswell Hill. It happened on an evening when only two people were in the flat – Jess herself, and her boyfriend, John Street.

  Jess had been at the epicentre of the blaze (you only had to look at her face to know that). She had lain there until the firemen came in and carried her out. She probably would have died from smoke inhalation except that the drugs had sent her so far under she was hardly breathing.

  Street had been injured too, requiring skin grafts to his badly burned hands. He got his injuries beating at the flames to put them out – trying to quell the blaze.

  The fire didn’t have a natural or accidental origin. It was set on purpose. The crime scene investigators, who came in while the ashes were still hot, had traced it back to a metal wastepaper basket. One of these experts gave evidence in court. He was young, personable, straight out of a TV crime show. “Someone had filled the basket with papers, drenched the papers in lighter fluid and dropped a match in on top,” he said, describing the actions in the air with his hands. “Then the basket itself had been tipped over.”

  “In an attempt to spread the blaze further and faster?”

  “Objection,” Brian Pritchard interjected. “That’s interpretation.”

  “Sustained,” the judge agreed.

  The Crown prosecutor didn’t seem troubled. “My learned colleague,” he said, “is trying to leave open the possibility that the fire could have caught by accident. In your opinion, is that a genuine possibility?”

  The CSI expert shook his head. “Absolutely not.”

  “And why is that?”

  “We were able to trace the chemical residues, and that gave us the spatter pattern from the lighter fluid as it was poured out. It was poured in a series of wide arcs around the wastepaper basket, extending up to five feet in each direction. So whoever was pouring it was not trying to start a blaze in the wastepaper basket itself. They were using the wastepaper basket to set the flat on fire.”

  Jess experienced the first vertiginous moment of doubt. She remembered sitting on the floor with that wastepaper basket gripped between her knees, its mouth a blurred and wavering circle into which she was dropping… what? Something slick and cold that she had tried to tear but couldn’t, so she’d had to settle for crumpling and twisting and folding.

  “Photographs,” John Street said when it came to his turn on the witness stand. “Jess was tearing up photographs of the two of us.”

  “And why was that?” the prosecutor asked him in a completely unconvincing tone of surprise.

  “We’d been arguing about… well, about nothing really. Nothing much. We’d shot up earlier in the evening.”

  “You’d taken heroin?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re both addicts?”

  “Yes. And the hit wasn’t… wasn’t anything much, and Jess got crazy. She wanted me to go out and get some more, but we didn’t have any money…”

  Some of this was raising answering echoes in Jess’s mind. Not the argument: there had been so many arguments, it was hard to zero in on any one. And not the ache of the incomplete fix: there had been lots of those too, as their need grew and their ability to feed it diminished. But that night’s high had seemed to her to be as deep as an ocean.

  What she remembered was the photographs. Her dream (not a dream, she didn’t dream, just an image, just a thought) of holding her own face in her hands crystallised now into an actual memory. And the reek of lighter fluid, the slimy feel of it on her fingers. The doubt she’d felt earlier congealed into something like terror. She wanted to deny the things that were being said about her, but the memories trapped her, hemmed her into a space even tighter than the tiny dock in which she sat. It was as though there was a second trial running in parallel with the real one, in which she was the witness and the defendant and the judge. She was trying herself, and her defence didn’t hold up at all.

  “Mr Street has testified that you set a fire in your flat on the night in question. In the wastepaper basket. Do you deny this?”

  “No, I… no… no.”

  “And is Mr Street correct about what it was you burned?”

  “Yes.”

  “Photographs of the two of you together.”

  “Yes.”

  The bare truth. No equivocation. The only way of establishing what had really happened was to follow the trail all the way to the end. If she lied or swerved away, she might improve her chances of being found innocent, but not of actually being innocent. The one without the other was no use to her at all.

  “Then your relationship with your boyfriend – with Mr Street – wasn’t going well?”

  “No. Not very well. We kept on arguing. And… fighting. We fought. I mean, he… John… he used to… hit me.”

  “Hit you? Physically abuse you? Did you report any of these assaults at the time? Tell friends what was happening, or family?”

  “No.” We didn’t have any friends. And I couldn’t make Brenda any more unhappy than she was.

  “But you went to your doctor, or to a hospital? An A & E? Your injuries were documented?”

  “No.” He wouldn’t let me go. He didn’t want anyone to see. And he knew where to hit me so it didn’t show.

  “Well, let’s confine ourselves to the verbal altercations between the two of you. There’s at least some consensus that they actually occurred. You argued about drugs?”

  “And other things.” Everything, really. Nothing was too small for their mutual resentment to catch on and scrape against. Every chance word was a declaration of war. Mostly it wasn’t drugs at all, and it wasn’t love. It wasn’t even you hit me, John. You’re supposed to love me and you keep hitting me! It was you didn’t pull the chain, the last Mars bar was mine, you said that sarcastically, it’s your turn to go to the shops, this place is a tip, can you at least open a window? Because that’s what you do when you’re heading for a brick wall and accelerating. You pounce on trivia. The things that really matter can’t be said and don’t have to be. They’re lying like submerged rocks under the spray and froth of everything you do say. Everything you shout and scream and snarl.

  “And how did you feel on the night of the fire?”

  “How did I…?”

  “About Mr Street. About your relationship. How did you feel?”

  “It’s hard
to say.”

  “But if you had to put it in a few words. In one word, even.”

  “I felt… trapped.” That wasn’t new. But it had been strong that night. Stronger than usual. The urge to get out of a relationship that had become abusive, dangerous and desperate. To push John out of her life and be herself again. When she tore up the photographs, it had started with that impulse: they were photographs of her and John together, and she was trying to rip him from her side, as though some weird voodoo might translate that act into reality.

  She saw Pritchard in his seat at the defence table, staring down at his files and shaking his head slowly from side to side. But the word was out and she wasn’t sorry. It was the truth. The truth was her refuge. If she told the truth, everything would come out right.

  But it didn’t. It just kept on getting worse.

  The ninth day of the trial was the hardest. That was when Alex’s parents gave their evidence. They both worked, the father as a bus driver and the mother at the snack counter of the Muswell Hill Everyman. Two or three nights out of every week, depending on the vagaries of their shifts, Alex came home to an empty flat, warmed up his own dinner in the microwave and put himself to bed. The night of the fire was one of those times.

  “So Alex was alone that night?”

  “Yes.” Tears ran down Mrs Beech’s red, scrunched face. “I’ll never forgive myself. Not ever.”

  Alone. And most likely asleep when the smoke started pouring up through the floorboards of his bedroom. He woke up already choking to death. He might have made it out of the flat, but either he couldn’t find his way in the suffocating pall, or he was just too weak from the smoke damage to get that far. He crawled into the polythene playhouse that was still in his room although he was too old for it now and never played in it. He died curled up on the floor, the molten plastic weeping white-hot tears on to his exposed flesh.

  That was where the prosecution rested, more or less. The defence did their best, but Jess was briefing against them now. Her memories of the fire agreed on every point with the scenario the Crown’s lawyers had so eloquently and persuasively laid out. She told the truth, and damned herself.