Privilege

The Thing He Left Out Philippa Norgate had put the police interview on the table with a yellow marker resting across the first page. Tom Dyer picked up the marker, turned it between his fingers, and put it back exactly where it had been. He had spent most of the afternoon doing small things like that: shifting a glass of water he wasn't drinking, aligning his telephone with the edge of his notebook, trying to make a chair comfortable that had been bought for people who stayed half an hour. Kate Treadwell waited until he had finished telling them about the estate agent. There were other matters she could have asked him about, but she had learnt not to hurry a client through something simply because she already knew which part mattered. 'It was the third valuation,' Tom said. 'That's why I went round. She'd agreed we would get three, and then we would choose someone and put the house up. When I got there she said she wanted to wait until after Easter.' 'Which you took badly,' Kate said. She had heard a dozen explanations of the house sale during the preparation, and Tom always reached the same point with the same grievance, regardless of where he began. 'I'd moved out in January. I was paying rent on top of everything else. I wasn't in a position to wait another six months because Sophie had changed her mind.' Kate pointed out that waiting until after Easter was unlikely to amount to another six months. Tom insisted it would have done, once Sophie found something else to delay the sale. He turned towards Philippa as though she might remember another conversation in which he had made the point more successfully. She was writing the date of the valuation on her pad, although Kate knew it had already been recorded elsewhere. Philippa liked keeping the chronology visible when a client began to stray around it. 'You told the police you argued in the kitchen,' Kate said. 'You told them she asked you to leave, and you did.' Tom agreed that this was what he'd told the police. Kate moved to the answer he had given a few lines further down. 'You also said you never laid a hand on her.' Tom's attention returned to the marker. 'I didn't hit her.' 'That's what we have to be accurate about,' Kate said. 'I need what happened, whether or not you think the officer asked the right question.' Kate opened the interview. It had taken place in March, before Tom had been charged, when he still appeared to believe a sufficiently emphatic denial would settle the matter. The interviewing officer had asked the question twice. On each occasion Tom had answered without hesitation. He had not touched Sophie. Not once, not in anger, not even to move past her at the door. She let him read the two answers. He did so reluctantly, although he had seen the transcript enough times to recognise the page from the first sentence. 'Perhaps you mean you didn't punch her,' Kate said. 'Or you didn't intend to hurt her. That's different from what you told the officer, and it's different from what you're telling me now.' Tom placed the marker down with more force than he intended. Its plastic body made a light hollow noise on the table. 'This is the part where you say I'm lying.' 'You have told two different versions. I'm asking which one is true.' 'We were having a row. People grab each other in rows. It doesn't mean they kill them.' Philippa stopped writing. Neither woman spoke for a moment. Beyond the office door, someone was trying to persuade a printer to accept a tray it had apparently rejected all morning. Kate asked him to go back to the moment at the kitchen door and explain who had touched whom. She wanted to know precisely where Sophie had been standing when he reached for her. 'I grabbed her arm,' Tom said. 'Her right, I think. She was walking away while I was talking, and I caught hold of her. She told me to let go. I wasn't trying to drag her anywhere, if that's what you're asking.' Kate asked whether he had released Sophie. Tom said that he had, and then made himself add something he had plainly been hoping to avoid. 'I pushed her away from me.' Kate drew the interview closer but kept her voice level. 'Show me, as well as you can. I don't want you demonstrating it on either of us.' Tom stood. The room was small, and for a man of his height there was not much space between the conference table and the bookcase. He took up a position beside the empty fourth chair and lifted his hand as though somebody stood in front of him. He appeared faintly ridiculous, which he seemed to know, but Kate did not interrupt. 'It was like this. She pulled away and we were both shouting. I pushed with one hand, here.' He touched the air at shoulder height. 'She went sideways, against the corner of the counter. Not her head. Her hip, I think. She knocked a pile of letters onto the floor.' Kate asked him to describe the collision again, then what Sophie had done afterwards. She wanted what he'd actually seen, before the photographs. 'Yes. She shouted at me. She was furious. She picked up the letters and threw them at the door. They didn't reach me, before you ask.' 'I'm asking what happened, Tom,' Kate reminded him, after he pointed out that none of the letters had reached him. He sat again, having to move the empty fourth chair back into place with his foot. His ears were red. 'Then she said I had to get out, and if I ever touched her again she'd call the police. I left.' Kate watched him for a little while, searching for the practiced quality she sometimes heard when a client had reheard a difficult account so often it no longer sounded like a memory. Tom was clumsy with this one. He disliked the unflattering details and kept trying to shorten them, but the sequence held when she moved back through it. Kate asked what he could tell her about Sophie's condition when he left the house. She wanted what he had actually seen, including any sign that the push had injured her. Kate pointed out that there needn't be blood for somebody to be hurt. She had a note of the time from the original interview, but she wanted to hear him give it again. 'When did you leave?' 'I know. I'm not saying it was all right.' Tom reached for the glass, found it empty and set it back. 'It was about twenty past seven. I checked my phone when I got to the car because my brother had sent me something. I told the police that part.' Philippa consulted her copy of the digital schedule. 'The message was at nineteen eighteen. Your reply went at nineteen twenty-six, from the handset.' 'What did she say as you left?' Kate asked. 'That I could speak to her solicitor about the house. Which was a joke, because she hadn't appointed one.' 'Anything else?' 'That she didn't want to see me again until I was able to behave like an adult.' There was a small shift in his expression when he repeated the words. Kate had the impression he still wanted to answer Sophie, seven months after the argument and six months after they had buried her. Kate turned back to the interview transcript. 'You knew Sophie had been killed when you spoke to the police. Why didn't you tell them about this?' 'Because I knew what it would sound like.' Tom shifted in his chair, his voice rising as he went on. 'They were asking me about a murder. What was I meant to do, tell them I'd shoved her on the last evening anyone had seen her alive?' 'Yes.' He looked at her, then laughed once, without amusement. 'Right. Fine. Easy for you.' 'No. It wouldn't have been easy. It would have been the truth, and it might have saved us from explaining why you lied about it in the first place.' Philippa reached for the water jug, filled Tom's glass and left it within reach. She did not offer comfort he wasn't asking for. 'Have you told anybody else what happened? Your brother, anyone you were seeing at the time, a friend from work? Even after you were arrested?' 'No. My brother knows we had a row. Everybody knows we had a row, but nobody knows I grabbed her. I haven't said it to anyone.' Kate waited until Philippa had written down the answer. 'Why are you telling us today, after all this time?' Tom gave a tired shrug. 'I thought you might find out anyway.' 'How?' 'There was a photograph they showed me. A mark on her arm. They said it could have come from somebody holding her. I've been thinking about it.' Kate remembered the photograph. There were several bruises in the pathology material, some attributable to the fatal assault and some less readily dated or explained. The officer in the interview had never established that the mark came from Tom's grip. Kate had been preparing to ask the pathologist about precisely that limitation. Now she had an account that might explain it. 'You should have told us when you first remembered,' Philippa said. She closed her pad gently. 'You understand that, don't you?' 'I didn't forget. I just didn't...' He pulled his glass towards him. 'I thought if I told you, you'd go the same way as everyone else.' Kate had heard variations of that sentence in consulting rooms, prison interview booths and cells where clients wore their ordinary clothes and pretended the clothes made a difference. Sometimes it was an attempt to obtain a promise. This time Tom seemed genuinely embarrassed to have said it. 'Philippa and I are defending you on a murder charge,' Kate said. 'If there's something about that night we don't know, it puts us in a worse position. We can't make sensible decisions with half an account. And I won't stand up in front of a jury and tell them you were entirely peaceful with Sophie when you've told me otherwise.' 'You're going to tell them I pushed her?' 'We're going to consider the evidence, your instructions and whether you give evidence yourself. We aren't deciding all of that in five minutes. There are things the prosecution must prove and things it would be improper for me to say. We need to get those right.' 'But you're still doing the case?' Kate held his gaze. 'Yes.' She did not qualify it with a speech about the duty of advocates or the presumption of innocence. Tom needed an answer to a simpler question, and for now she could give him one. Philippa turned the page to the plan of the downstairs rooms. 'Let's deal with the way you left. She followed you through the hall, did she? And what do you actually remember about her keys?' 'The hall door was open. She came after me as far as the front door. The keys were on the little shelf by the stairs.' He hesitated, looking at the photographs Philippa had placed beside him. 'No, that's what I've seen in the pictures. I don't remember where she put them that night.' 'Good,' Philippa said, marking the distinction beside his answer. 'Then don't borrow a detail from a photograph and turn it into a memory.' Tom gave her a reluctant half-smile. It was the first expression he had worn that afternoon which looked like him rather than a man trying to behave correctly for lawyers. They worked through the last ten minutes of his visit. Kate went through what Tom might have handled in the kitchen. He remembered some of it, as anyone who had once lived there would: the counter beside the kettle, a drawer where they kept spare batteries, perhaps the lamp in the sitting room when he had collected a box earlier that year. He was uncertain about the last detail and said so after Philippa made him go back over it. Kate did not encourage him to produce certainty where it wasn't there. By five o'clock the light beyond the conference-room window had weakened enough for the interior to be reflected in the glass. Philippa had opened a fresh sheet headed CONTACT, and below it had recorded the discrepancies between Tom's new instructions and the police interview. Tom looked exhausted. He had drunk the water at last and was struggling to find his coat, which had fallen from the hook on the back of the chair and ended up under the table. 'Before you go,' Kate said, 'I'm going to ask you the question you've probably been waiting for.' He straightened, coat over one arm. 'Did you go back to the house after leaving at about twenty past seven, or arrange for anybody else to go there?' 'No. Neither.' He made an effort to stay looking at her, although his coat was still hanging from one arm. 'Did you cause any further injury to Sophie, in that house or anywhere else?' 'No. I left her there. She was alive, she was shouting at me, and I went home.' 'You believe that?' Tom asked. The question had been waiting beneath most of his answers that afternoon. Kate would have liked to say that belief had nothing to do with her work, but it would have been both unkind and untrue. Lawyers made provisional judgments about people all day. They had to be able to revise them. 'I can work with an account that stays consistent when we examine it,' she said. 'That's why you must give us the whole of it. No more keeping back the part you think makes you look bad.' Tom stood with his coat half on. 'It did make me look bad.' 'It does.' His mouth twitched. He didn't thank her. On his way out he paused beside Philippa's desk, asked whether the new barrister's conference would still happen on Thursday, and looked vaguely surprised when Philippa reminded him that Kate was the barrister in question. He had lost track of which appointment was which. Philippa gave him the date and told him to call her directly if he remembered anything else, however small. When the outer door closed, she returned to the conference room. Kate was still sitting with the interview open. 'Well,' Philippa said, taking the yellow marker back. 'At least he didn't wait until he was in the witness box.' 'He considered it.' 'I think he considered doing it after the trial.' Kate folded the page. 'How much of the bruise evidence do you think the Crown can connect to him?' 'At the moment? They can invite the jury to make the connection. The photograph doesn't date it for them.' 'We need to look at the pathologist's full schedule again. And we need to discuss with Tom whether he wants to make any further statement, after we've considered the consequences properly.' Philippa added both to her list. The printer outside had stopped protesting. Somewhere down the corridor a cleaner ran water into a bucket, and Kate became aware that she had skipped lunch again. She offered Philippa the unopened packet of oatcakes she'd brought from home, knowing she would refuse. Philippa took two and put the packet in her bag for later. 'I've got another meeting in twenty minutes,' she said. 'I'll send you my notes this evening.' 'Have you got anything sensible planned for supper?' 'At this rate, two oatcakes and whatever my husband can be persuaded to order.' Kate gathered the interview pages and checked that the revised statement of instructions was properly marked. She had no way of knowing whether Tom's admission would help or hurt him before a jury. She did know it would have come out one way or another if they asked the right questions, and at least they had time to prepare for it. There was an unpleasant amount still to do before November.