Watching You (33 page)

T
hey say love and death are like two uninvited guests at the party of life—one takes your heart and the other takes the heartbeat. They are the essence of human experience, like two sides of the same coin, spinning through the air. Falling.

Joe watches the coin turn. Owen opens his hand and catches it, slaps it against his wrist and looks at the result. He rests the coin on his thumbnail and he flips it again. A court security officer takes a set of keys from his belt. Joe has to step back as he unlocks the heavy metal door.

The cells are below the courtrooms of the Old Bailey in a building that dates from 1902, when it replaced the infamous Newgate Prison, which for seven hundred years had housed prisoners and executed the worst of them. Many were hung on the street outside, making their final journey along Dead Man’s Walk, where large noisy crowds threw rotten fruit, vegetables and stones.

Owen Cargill is sitting in a chair facing a small barred window, high on the wall, cocking his head as though listening to something. He’s wearing a neatly ironed cotton shirt and trousers that are a size too small; his hair is shaved tight to his skull, revealing every bump and hollow.

He flips the coin again, but turns suddenly at the sound of the door. The coin drops and rolls on its edge in a slow circle before toppling and rattling into stillness. Owen’s face twists into a crooked smile.

“Is that you, Professor?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you’d come today.”

No matter how often he visits Owen, Joe struggles to hide his shock. It helps that his reaction can’t be seen, although he suspects that Owen realizes what impact he has upon people.

“You sound stressed,” he says, resting his hands on his knees.

“I’m fine,” replies Joe, taking a seat on a narrow bench against the wall. Owen reaches down between his shoes and feels for the coin with his fingertips. He flips it again.

“Heads or tails?”

“Heads.”

Owen catches the coin and slaps it against his wrist. He holds it up for Joe.

“Did I win or lose?”

“You lost.”

“Best of three?”

Depending upon the light, Owen’s eye sockets can look like bottomless holes that gape openly into his brain. It’s only when he turns his face to the window that Joe can see the scarred pink and white skin in the sockets. His pupils were gouged out by something jagged and sharp rather than surgically precise. According to the surgeon who operated on him at the Royal Eye Hospital in Manchester, it was most likely a shard of broken mirror. His eyes were never found.

For the first few months of his hospitalization and recuperation, Owen fell apart. Joe witnessed the disintegration. He didn’t wash or shave. He barely slept. His stubble grew thick and dark and the bandages over his eyes made him look like an emaciated panda. Joe could smell his nightmares and rancid hatred and hear the despair in his voice. All that changed when the trial began. He arrived each day at the Old Bailey, stepping from the prison van, looking more like a defense lawyer than a defendant. It’s the same today. His suit jacket is hanging behind the door because he doesn’t want to crease the sleeves.

Joe took advantage of Owen’s presence at the trial to schedule meetings in the holding cells during meal breaks or when the judge adjourned early for the day. For a long time Owen played games with him, teasing out the details of when he began to follow Marnie. When he first joined the army, he had no idea that Christina Logan had fallen pregnant and given birth to a daughter. It was only later, when he tracked Christina to the farmhouse, that he put the pieces together and realized why a married woman would start an affair with a fifteen-year-old boy she caught hiding in her basement, spying on her. She and her husband had been trying for a baby for years, but Christina had miscarried or failed to fall pregnant. Thomas spent weeks away, working on the rigs, their marriage faltering.

“She didn’t love me,” Owen said. “She used me.”

Owen had written Christina letters, but they were always returned unopened. Eventually, he went looking for her and discovered Marnie.

“I had a daughter, but Christina kept denying it; telling me to leave. We could have been happy together, but the bitch told me to stay away. She didn’t want me to see my daughter.”

“Is that why you killed her?” asked Joe.

“She killed herself.”

“You didn’t save her.”

“I saved Marnie.”

Joe had a dozen such meetings with Owen during the course of the trial. He marveled at the defendant’s neatness and attention to grooming. In the months since that night at the farmhouse, he had mastered dozens of new skills, learning how to navigate around his room at the psychiatric unit and arrange things on the shelves so that he could find them without the aid of sight. He had also learned to walk with a cane and was studying Braille.

Owen rests the coin on top of his thumb and spins it again. He has become practised at throwing it almost to eye-height and catching it in the same palm.

“Is she here?” he asks.

“You know I can’t talk about her.”

“But she’s definitely here, isn’t she? She’ll come today.”

Joe doesn’t answer.

“Has Malcolm come back?”

“No.”

“I like him. He’s good for her. She needs somebody like him.” Owen smiles. “Does that surprise you?” The coin is rolling over his knuckles between his fingers. “Marnie should thank me rather than blame me for what’s happened.”

“I don’t think she’s going to do that.”

“She could be in this cell with me. They found Marnie’s DNA in the caretaker’s flat and Hennessy’s apartment, but none of mine.”

“You planted it there.”

“Can you prove that? I could have pleaded not guilty and made Marnie give evidence. I could have had her cross-examined. I could have claimed that she knew about me all along. We were working together…”

“The jury wouldn’t have believed you.”

Owen looks up at the window. Joe can clearly see his empty eye sockets, which look like sunken craters beneath his brows. “I hope she realizes what I’ve done for her.”

He flips the coin and catches it in his palm, turning it onto his wrist. “Heads or tails?”

Upstairs, Joe walks through the marbled anterooms and foyers that are crowded with black-gowned barristers, briefing solicitors, defendants, family, friends, and random souls summoned to the lottery of jury duty and hoping their excuses might excuse them.

Marnie is sitting on a bench seat between DI Gennia and her lawyer, Craig Bryant. She looks up at Joe and smiles. Relieved. She’s dressed in a mid-length skirt with a white blouse and navy blazer. Her hair has grown long again and she’s wearing lipstick and mascara.

“You look terrific,” he says.

“I feel like a tranny on my first trip out as a woman,” she replies, forcing a smile. Then she apologizes to Gennia. “Did that sound terrible?”

He shakes his head.

Joe crouches in front of Marnie, taking her hands. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m OK.”

“Do you want to have a quick chat before we go in?”

“No, I’ll be fine.”

Craig Bryant is wearing a charcoal-colored suit and a black robe over his shoulders. His horsehair wig is resting on a bundle of files that are sealed by red ribbons wrapped around a spool. “I’ve just been explaining it to her,” he says. “If she doesn’t want to read the statement herself, I can read it for her. There is no jury anymore, only a judge. Cargill has been found guilty. This is just a sentencing hearing.” Bryant turns to Marnie. “If you get in the witness box and for some reason you feel overwhelmed or want to stop, just ask me. Take a drink of water. I can talk to the judge.”

She nods.

“I know you said you didn’t want anyone to read your statement beforehand, but if you wanted a second opinion…?”

“No.”

Gennia interrupts. “I thought your father was coming.”

“He’s with Zoe. They’re already inside.”

Bryant looks at his watch. “We should go in.”

Climbing the steps, they pass through a second small waiting room and follow a corridor to Court 1. Joe and Gennia go to the public gallery, which is upstairs, overlooking the body of the court. Thomas Logan is seated in the front row, craning to look over the banister. Zoe is next to him, sitting alongside Ruiz, whom she treats like a favorite uncle. She has taken to visiting him on those days that she’s isn’t hanging out with Ryan Coleman.

“I saved you a seat,” she says, waving to Joe. She squeezes his hand excitedly. “I’ve never seen the inside of a courtroom.”

“I hope it’s the last time.”

“What if I become a lawyer?”

“Please don’t do that,” says Ruiz.

“Why not?”

“They’re like monkeys who get dressed up and fling poo at each other.”

Zoe laughs, not sure if he’s joking.

The judge’s bench is below them to the right of them and the jury box directly ahead with the witness stand in between the two. A glass security panel surrounds the dock.

Joe glances over the railing. He can only see the top of Marnie’s head. For weeks they’ve been preparing for this day. Talking about what might happen.

She chose not to attend Owen Cargill’s trial and the prosecution didn’t call her to give evidence once Owen had changed his plea to guilty. The jury found him guilty of murdering Patrick Hennessy, Niall Quinn, Trevor Waite, and Daniel Hyland, whose body was discovered in a shallow grave near the farmhouse, between two gnarled apple trees. Owen admitted ambushing Daniel because the journalist had discovered his existence. He strangled him with a pair of women’s tights and dragged his body through the hole in the back of the wardrobe. He dressed Daniel in his mother’s clothes and used her wheelchair to transport him to the lock-up garage in the rear lane. No CCTV cameras. No blood. No clues.

After a three-month investigation and a public outcry, the Director of Public Prosecutions decided not to charge Marnie with any offense, particularly in light of what she and her children had been through. Marnie received the news on the day she was released from a psychiatric hospital in Kent and allowed to go home. Since then she’s been seeing Joe three times a week, trying to deal with the creations of her unconscious and accept the existence of her dissociative disorder.

The professor has seen no trace of Malcolm since that night at the farmhouse. Marnie’s voice, mannerisms, and tone are all as before. Joe has tried to find the triggers, putting Marnie under pressure, making her relive those final hours, but no cracks have appeared in her psyche and no evidence has emerged of a second malevolent personality, an evil doppelgänger, a cuckoo in the nest.

Marnie no longer denies that Malcolm existed.

“I know what he did was wrong,” she told Joe, “but I’m not sorry for what he did.”

“But he’s inside
you
.”

“Not anymore.”

“How do you know?”

“I can’t feel him.”

“Could you feel him before?”

“No.”

Joe used hypnosis and deep relaxation techniques. He played word association games and took Marnie back to the morning her mother died, making her relive the tragedy. Throughout these sessions, she didn’t fashion elaborate lies or try to evade his questions, yet there were times when she gripped the arms of her chair as though she felt suspended and weightless, ready to lift off and float away. It wasn’t her body, but her mind that wanted to break loose.

“All rise,” announces the usher. A door opens behind the bench and the judge enters dressed in a black and violet robe. The wig on his head is perched high on his dome, barely covering his baldness. Moments later, Owen Cargill is led into the dock from the cells below. Flanked by two security guards, one holding each of his arms, he is turned to face the bench. Owen immediately reaches out and feels for the glass wall, judging the dimensions of his new surroundings. Turning his head, he scans the courtroom as though looking for Marnie. After several moments, he stops and stares in the direction of the prosecutor’s table, where Marnie is sitting beside Craig Bryant. She has her head down, not looking at him.

Judge Baum asks the prosecution and defense counsel if they’re ready to proceed.

“Yes, My Lord,” says the prosecutor, who begins by tabling a psychiatric assessment of Owen Cargill, which includes statements from three different psychologists and psychiatrists who have been treating him at a high-security NHS hospital. “We also have Marnella Logan in the court today, who would like to present a victim impact statement.”

The mention of Marnie’s name seems to ignite something in Owen, who leans forward on his bench seat, craning to get closer to her. Meanwhile, Marnie makes her way to the witness box. The lawyers are conferring. Owen tells them to be quiet.

Judge Baum interrupts him. “Mr. Cargill, please refrain from speaking.”

“They were talking,” says Owen. “I wanted to be able to hear her footsteps.”

“Counsel are allowed to confer.”

“What is she wearing?” asks Owen.

Nobody answers.

Owen looks from side to side. “Somebody, please tell me.”

“Pull yourself together, Mr. Cargill, or I will have you removed.”

“Is she wearing the pencil skirt and white blouse, maybe with a blazer?”

“This is your last warning,” says Judge Baum, signaling to the guard.

“Sure. Right. I’m sorry.” Owen bows his head and puts his hands together.

Marnie is staring at him, appalled. Up until now she hasn’t seen or acknowledged Owen’s injuries. They were explained to her, but she claimed to have no memory of gouging out his eyes. For a fleeting moment she seems to waver, her body shaking. Then she looks up at the public gallery and sees Zoe and her father.

Stepping into the witness box, she unfolds a piece of paper that she has crumpled in her fist. She reads the first sentence to herself and then out loud.

“The man being sentenced today claims to be my father and says that he was protecting me. But a real father is someone who holds you when you have nightmares and kisses your scraped knees. He carries you on his shoulders when you’re tired and pulls out thorns and drinks cups of pretend tea at pretend tea parties, surrounded by dolls and teddy bears. A real father reads bedtime stories and takes you swimming and to ballet and to drama classes. He waits up when you go on your first date. He wipes away your tears when you’re jilted. He walks you up the aisle when you get married and cries when he holds his grandchild for the first time. A real father loves you unconditionally, not because your eyes are the same color as his, or you share the same DNA. He loves you because he’s the one who’s always been there.”