Reputation by Sarah Vaughan

Author:Sarah Vaughan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2022-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

Thirty-three 13 June 2022

EMMA

The general housekeeping of the court and the prosecution opening have taken longer than I expected, and it isn’t until after lunch that the first prosecution witness is called.

It is Julia, of course. We have had very little contact over the past six months. None, bar some texts when I was first arrested, Julia being particularly irate at being evicted from Cleaver Square for three days. Then, once it became clear she would be a prosecution witness, not speaking to her became a condition of my bail. Still, she could have found a way to convey her support, through Claire, had she wanted.

Yes, it’s fair to say that Julia hasn’t proved an ally. There’s no reason why she should, really, the strands of friendship becoming more strained, more tenuous, over the past four years. I guess it was inevitable; petty irritations, such as my mistakenly putting chicken on her shelf in the fridge despite her being vegetarian, allowed to fester; larger ideological differences never adequately addressed. In the months before Mike’s death, the once-weekly shared meals that had proved so crucial to smoothing out concerns had stopped, none of us having the time to cook, or the inclination to fix a date. Did she resent my higher profile? As shadow transport secretary, working hard in an unglamorous field that rarely made the news, I’m sure it rankled, as did my reaction to my trolling: after all, she’d put up with plenty of misogyny during her twenty-year career. And then, of course, she was the one who found me, bent over Mike. From that moment, any irritation with me seemed to immediately harden, and it felt as though she judged me as guilty from the start.

I think I sensed it from the moment she stood at the top of the stairs leading down to the kitchen.

‘Hello? Is anybody there?’

Her voice filtered down: higher pitched than usual, with a note of trepidation. For a moment I couldn’t respond: my throat felt flayed. Finally, I managed to squeak: ‘I’m down here. The light’s fused.’

I could hear her fumbling in the under-stairs cupboard then flicking the switch so that the hall was flooded with light, though the stairwell remained gloomy; the basement floor where I squatted the other side of Mike, shrouded in darkness still. Up in the hall, the light blazed, and Julia stood illuminated like some avenging angel. A querulous note crept into her voice as she peered down the stairs, her head tilted. ‘What on earth are you doing down there?’

Now, as she stands in the witness box, dressed in a sombre shift dress with a trademark resin necklace – black, white and pink, like liquorice allsorts – and her angular, heavy-framed glasses, she refuses to look at me. Perhaps it’s easier to knife someone if you fail to acknowledge they’re there.

Sonja Jackson is asking her about when she first walked in and stared down at me from the hallway.

‘I asked her what had happened.’

‘And what did she say?’

‘That there had been an accident.

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