A Fatal Verdict by Tim Vicary Page A

was really a question of her forgiving him , but that’s how a young girl’s mind might work, especially if she was as naive and lacking in self-confidence as these statements from her mother and her tutors imply. She’d dumped him, but somehow he’d made her feel guilty, and part of her wanted forgiveness, so she went there hoping that something like that might happen. And it did, didn’t it? They made love, then she got in the bath. Then while he was out of the flat she was overcome by remorse and killed herself. That’s what he’ll say. Trust me, I can see Savendra inventing it now.’
    Inventing it. This was what unsettled him about lawyers, Terry thought. He liked Sarah, but she was still in love with her own cleverness, all of them were. She hadn’t had to see the girl’s dismembered body on the mortuary table as he had, or confront her hysterical mother in the hospital, wrapping his arms around hers to prevent her scratching the eyes out of the boyfriend who stood there brazenly claiming that Shelley had killed herself because of the incessant pressure from her parents to succeed. Sarah hadn’t witnessed that, nor had she sat in the interview room for hours as he had, carefully restraining his temper while the cocky young bastard faked his grief and changed his story by the day.
    And yet it was her job to face him in court. If she could be persuaded to take up the case at all, that is.
    ‘He may say all that, but her student friends disagree,’ he responded sourly. ‘The affair was over as far as she was concerned, they say. She just went back to collect her possessions.’
    ‘What possessions?’ Sarah said. ‘A bag, some underwear and jeans, a couple of novels, a magazine? Couldn’t she have bought new ones?’
    ‘They were her things. Students are poor.’
    ‘Granted. And I’ll make that point of course. But we have to accept the possibility that this girl Shelley went back to her boyfriend’s flat at a time that made it virtually certain she would meet him.’
    ‘Her friend Sandy might corroborate that,’ said DS Tracy Litherland, speaking for the first time. ‘She’d offered to go back with Shelley several times to collect these things, but Shelley always put her off. And then she went alone.’
    ‘There you are then.’ Sarah sat back in her chair, smiling. ‘First break of serve to the defence. And, it seems, she’d been seeing a psychiatrist. What’s that all about?’
    ‘Bi-polar disorder,’ said Tracy warily. ‘She’d had treatment for a couple of years, her mother said. She took lithium to keep it under control.’
    ‘Any suicidal tendencies?’
    ‘Not according to her mother, no. None at all.’
    ‘The defence aren’t going to believe that, are they? Given that Kidd is claiming suicide. Savendra’s going to call that psychiatrist, for sure. This could get nasty, for the parents. Especially if Kidd claims they put pressure on her, as ...’ she leafed through the papers in front of her ‘. .. it seems he does. Not looking so easy now, is it?’
    Terry felt a little tic throbbing in his throat as it often did when he was angry. The case his team had spent a month knitting together was unravelling in front of him.
    ‘It’s your job to counter those arguments,’ he said sourly. ‘If they put them at all.’
    ‘I’ll do my best, of course,’ said Sarah. ‘If I advise the CPS to go ahead, that is. It’s my duty today to evaluate whether we have a chance of winning. What I’m pointing out is that the evidence to support your story is hardly conclusive. Not yet anyway.’
    ‘All right,’ said Terry angrily. ‘Okay, she had a psychiatric disorder and she was a first year undergraduate, I’ll grant you that. But most undergraduates don’t kill themselves. Maybe she did go back to the flat to meet him again, I don’t know. But look at his response when I asked him about these things in her bag. He said she’d come to stay and brought them with her. It was only when