Recalled to Life

At the foot of the stairs, an older grey-haired man with a lantern jaw was waiting.

‘Well done, lad,’ he said.

‘Shall I cuff him, sir?’

‘I doubt we’ll need to go as far as that, though if he gives any more bother, you can mebbe box his ears.’

The burly man laughed. The old jokes were best, especially when your boss made them.

Outside, the sun was low in the sky but still warm. It cast long shadows from the three police cars standing on the white gravel beneath the terrace. In the rearmost car’s shady interior the pale face of a woman could be seen, wedged between two WPCs. She looked straight ahead, showing no more animation than a death mask.

The uniformed officers took charge of the fair man and led him down from the terrace into the second car. He turned before he got in and looked back, not at the figures above him, but at the house itself, his gaze moving slowly along the whole façade. Then he let himself be pushed into the rear seat.

On the terrace the man with the jaw spoke a few words to his burly subordinate before running lightly down the steps and getting into the leading car. He held his arm aloft through the open window, like a waggon master preparing his train. Then he let it drop forward, the cars began to crunch gravel, and at the same time their bells started to sound and their lights to flash.

Smiling broadly, the burly man stood on the terrace till he could no longer see the flashing lights nor hear the sounding bells.

Then he turned his back on the sun and slowly re-entered the house.

TWO (#ulink_b721a068-7c29-5f39-8d5e-cec207775e27)

‘You can bear a little more light?’

‘I must bear it if you let it in.’

Lights.

Some hot, harsh and constant. Others driven at her like snow against a stove-pipe, melting soon as touching.

A shallow platform, one step up.

She takes it, pauses, sways, hears the pause and the sway in the watcher’s breath.

She thinks: So it must have felt for Mick, that first step on to the scaffold.

A hand steadies her. No executioner’s hand, but her saviour’s, Jay’s, cousin Jay Waggs, though she cannot yet think of him as saviour. She clutches her old leather-bound Bible to her skinny breast. He smiles at her, a warm smile in a young face, and a memory is touched of faraway times, faraway places. He urges her forward.

There is a chair. She sits. To her left, a pitcher of water with a glass. To her right, a small vase out of which a spray of freesia raises its hand of glory. Before her, a posy of microphones offering some protection from the flashing bulbs and probing gazes but none from the TV cameras covering her every move, like guns on a prison watchtower.

Mr Jacklin is speaking. Her solicitor. A small grey man who looks so dry that a very little pressure might crumble him to dust. But it is a dryness which kindles to fire at the spark of injustice.

He says, ‘Let me rehearse the situation in case anyone has strayed in from another planet. My client, Miss Cecily Kohler, was tried for the murder of her employer, Mrs Pamela Westropp, in nineteen sixty-three. She was found guilty and sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. Almost from the start, doubts were expressed in some quarters about the safeness of the verdict, but circumstances conspired to make a re-examination of the case virtually impossible until, two years ago, Miss Kohler’s kinsman, Jay Waggs, began to interest himself in the fate of his distant kinswoman, Cissy Kohler. The new evidence he uncovered was first presented to the public in the Ebor television programme Doubt last spring. Now the Home Secretary has at last accepted that there are serious grounds for believing there may have been a gross miscarriage of justice and he has issued a release order pending consideration of the new evidence by the Court of Appeal.

‘Until the decision of that court is officially made public, I cannot of course comment on the legal implications of what has happened. But I can point out the obvious. My client has spent a longer period in jail than any other woman in the annals of English penology. It goes without saying that she will need a proportional period of readjustment to the rigours of freedom. But being aware of the great public interest in the case, she has accepted the recommendation of her advisers that she should attend this press conference in the hope that thereafter she will be permitted a long breathing space free from the importunities of the media.’

‘Does that include Jay Waggs and Ebor television?’ calls a sharp-faced young woman.

Jay Waggs smiles at her and says, ‘One question per paper was the agreement. Is that yours, Sally?’

‘No! Miss Kohler, I’m Sally Blindcrake, Daily Sphere. How did it feel when you heard you were getting out?’

Cissy Kohler speaks so softly not even the posy of mikes can pick it up.

‘Sorry? I couldn’t catch that.’

‘She says she felt nothing,’ says Waggs. ‘Next question.’

‘Nothing?’ insists Blindcrake incredulously. ‘After all those years you’re told you’re innocent, and you feel nothing?’

Kohler raises her head and speaks again, this time loud enough to be heard.

‘I knew it already.’

A pause, then laughter, a ripple of applause.

‘Next,’ says Waggs.

‘Martin Redditch, BBC television. Miss Kohler, you didn’t apply for parole until nineteen seventy-six, though you could have applied earlier. Why was that?’

She frowns and says, ‘I wasn’t ready.’

‘Ready for what?’ shouts someone, but Redditch is pressing on, regardless of the one question limit.

‘But you were ready in ’seventy-six, right. And it looked like you were getting out, till you attacked and killed Officer Daphne Bush in Beddington Prison. At least, you got tried and sentenced for killing her. Or are you claiming to be innocent of that killing too?’

She takes her time, not as if the effort of remembering is painful so much as if the machinery of memory is rusty.

Finally: ‘I killed her,’ she says.

Redditch tries to follow up once more but now Waggs cuts him off.

‘OK, Martin, you got two in. We’ll call it one for each channel. Next!’

‘Norman Proudfoot, Church Times. Miss Kohler, the TV programme mentioned the Bible your mother gave you as a child. I presume it’s that same Bible you’re carrying now. Can you tell us what comfort you have drawn from it during your long imprisonment?’

She looks down at the book still clutched tight against her breast.

‘It helped me look in at myself. Without it, I don’t think I’d have survived.’

This is the longest answer she gives. The questions come thick and fast, some aggressive, some insinuating, some simply inane. All receive the same treatment – a pause followed by a short reply in a soft monotonous voice. Soon Waggs ceases to intervene and relaxes, faintly smiling as the cohorts of the Press dash themselves vainly against the walls of her solitude.

At last the room is silent. Waggs asks, ‘All done?’

Sally Blindcrake says, ‘I know I’ve had my question but it was so long ago I’ve forgotten what it was. How about me closing the circle?’

‘In the interests of balance? Well, that’s certainly a novelty in the Sphere, Sally. OK. Last question.’

‘Miss Kohler. Cecily. Cissy. If you were innocent, why did you confess?’