Border Crossing by Pat Barker Page A

running away from Lizzie Parks’s house. He was beginning to gabble, to make sarcastic remarks, anything to get Nigel to say of course it was ridiculous. He desperately needed Nigel to say that his evidence had merely confirmed what the jury knew already, but Nigel remained ominously silent. ‘You know, I almost get the feeling he thinks he wouldn’t have been convicted if it hadn’t been for me.’
    ‘Oh, that’s putting it a bit strong.’
    ‘A bit strong?’
    ‘I don’t like the sound of this, Tom. You don’t have to see him, surely?’
    ‘No, it’s –’
    ‘And if he starts pestering you, all you have to do is to tell the Home Office. He’ll be back inside in no time. That’s one thing you can say about the system. They’re on a very short leash.’ He raised his glass to his lips, pausing to add: ‘Thank God.’
    ‘I suppose what I want from you is some sort of reassurance that it’s not true. I mean, I’ve always assumed my contribution was… trivial, really, and what actually convicted him was the forensic evidence.’
    Nigel didn’t actually squirm on the bench, because he was too bulky for his movements to be interpreted in that way.’ Ye –es, but you know the forensic evidence really only connected him to the scene, and he didn’t deny being there. He didn’t deny touching her, he didn’t deny lifting the cushion off her face. There was nothing really conclusive. It’s not as if she had claw marks all over her face and he had her skin under his fingernails.’
    ‘But his fingerprints were all over the bedroom.’
    ‘The kittens were in the bedroom. He’d been to see the kittens twice – or so he said. Lizzie wasn’t around to deny it. The point is, Tom, the jury believed him. You know how long I hesitated about putting him in the box. I wasn’t frightened he was going to crack under the pressure and tell a pack of stupid lies – I knew he wouldn’t. I thought he’d come across as an arrogant little bastard – which he was. But in the event it paid off. He stood up straight, he looked them in the eye, he was well turned out, admitted that, yes, he’d been a naughty boy, he’d nicked off school, yes, he’d gone to the house, but only to see the kittens, and he was utterly devastated when he found the body. And when he saw the naughty man at the top of the stairs, he was frightened, he thought the naughty man was going to kill him, and so he didn’t tell anybody. Mad piece of behaviour in an adult, totally normal in a ten-year-old. I was looking at them all the way through. They believed him, Tom. They looked at that kid, and they didn’t believe he’d done it. I didn’t believe it, and I knew he had.’
    ‘And I convinced them he had?’
    ‘You convinced them he was capable of it. By the time Smithers was through with you, you’d told them that Danny was capable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality…’ Nigel was counting points off on his fingers. ‘Fully understood that killing somebody was seriously wrong, not just naughty. Fully understood that death was a permanent, irreversible state. Now I’m not saying you were wrong, but none of that helped Danny. By the time you’d finished what they had in their minds was not a nice little boy, but a precocious little killer.’
    ‘You didn’t say anything at the time.’
    ‘What was the point? You did the best you could for the kid, under very nasty hostile cross-examination. Smithers went right over the top that day. A lot of people more experienced than you would’ve been wilting by the end. I thought it was disgraceful. You’re not supposed to treat an expert witness as hostile, and he came very, very close. I remember Duncan sitting back in his chair at one point, and saying, “Well, that’s it, then. We can all go home.” And he threw his pencil down on the pad.’
    Duncan had been the defence counsel. ‘As bad as that?’
    ‘I don’t know about bad. The fact is the little bugger ended up inside.