The Bellwether Revivals (49 page)

He couldn’t bear it any longer. He tried to stand but his legs wouldn’t hold his weight, and he slumped back down into his chair. Jane came out onto the deck, holding a blue dressing gown. ‘I couldn’t find a towel,’ she said, ‘but this will do. Here.’ She wrapped it around his shoulders and he felt the warmth rising through his body. She rubbed the tops of his arms the way his mother used to do when she’d take him out of the bath.

They sat quietly together for a while. When he turned to look at her, he saw that she’d started to cry. She was padding her eyes with the sides of her fingers. ‘I can’t believe this is happening,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe he could do something like this. He just isn’t the kind of person who—’ She stopped, knowing he didn’t want to hear it, and dipped her eyes to the deck. ‘Ruth is dead, too. Marcus found her.’

‘Where?’

‘In her bedroom.’ Jane broke down again, sniffing back tears.

He stood up. ‘Show me.’

‘No, please, let’s just wait here.’ She reached out for him. ‘I don’t want to go in there. I don’t want to see it.’

‘You have to see it, Jane,’ he told her.

‘Why?’ she asked. Her voice was like a child’s.

‘Because if you don’t believe he could do something like this now, you’ll never believe it.’

And so they walked into the Bellwether house for the last time, through the sitting room and the hallway and the atrium, up the stairs into the master bedroom, following the trail of rubber from Iris’s leg-brace, with river water running off his trousers and his shoes.

The master bedroom was dim and warm. On the four-poster bed, Ruth lay on her back with her eyes closed and her mouth partly ajar. Oscar didn’t need to touch her cheek to know that she
was dead. There was a pillow on the floor beside her, and the linen slip was wrinkled and streaked. She’d been suffocated in her sleep.

Jane backed up against the doorframe, biting on her thumbnail, trembling.

A wave of nausea built up in Oscar’s stomach then, and he had to hold it in until he could make it down the stairs and out of the front door. He threw up on the steps, and the sight of Marcus’s car, still parked in the driveway, made his body weaken again. He thought of the little speech he’d given to the others. He thought about a party happening far away, people dancing to old-fashioned music, punts filled with champagne bottles, purple flowers, eveningwear, carnations, new aftershave. He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of the dressing gown and sat down. There was a bulk of something in one of the pockets and he lifted it out: a half-empty packet of clove cigarettes. In the other pocket: a book of matches.

‘Are you okay?’ Jane said, coming up behind him.

He just sat staring across the forecourt. The fountain was glinting in the dying sun. The pine trees stretched out before him in a perfect line. He opened the pack of cloves, put one in his mouth, struck a match and lit it. That sweet, cloying smoke unfurled around him. He felt it like a warm coal inside his lungs. Jane lowered her thin body down to the step beside him. She held his arm and leaned her head upon his shoulder. And they waited there together at the front of the Bellwether house, listening for the caterwaul of sirens.

Oscar waited on the courthouse balcony, looking through the streaked glass at the reporters and news crews huddling on the street below. There were some faces he remembered from the funeral: the fat-mouthed men who’d swarmed around the cortège and pushed their lenses against the windows, trying to capture his misery on film, who’d pawed so rabidly at the sides of the car that they dislodged and flattened one of the wreaths; and the orange-skinned women who’d pushed microphones up to his chin and asked him vile, insulting questions like ‘Is it true she was pregnant?’ and ‘Can you confirm she was sleeping with her brother?’ Now they were gathered like wolves in the grey afternoon light, prowling outside the courthouse. Cameramen and photographers were perched on high ladders with dark equipment, and press reporters were jostling for position behind a metal barrier, clutching onto dictaphones. As the lawyers ushered Theo through the doors to face them, there was a surging din of voices. The reporters called out their questions—one great shrieking disharmony—and the
tick tick tick
of flashbulbs brightened the street like fireworks.

Theo’s barrister was calm and upright. With a simple gesture of his arms, he managed to quiet the crowd. ‘I have a statement to make on behalf of Mr Bellwether,’ he said, ‘and then—listen to me, please, because I’m only going to say this once—we will not be taking any questions.’ Another shimmer of flashbulbs. A headache of light. Theo averted his eyes.

Lowering his glasses, the barrister read from a piece of paper: ‘I am satisfied that the judge, the Honourable Mr Justice Phillips, has seen fit to hand my son the maximum sentence of life imprisonment, despite the jury’s finding of diminished responsibility. From this point forward, I would appreciate it if you would all stop calling me in the middle of the night and refrain from parking your news vans across my driveway. Thank you.’ Voices clamoured as the barrister turned away. The cameras went on flashing and rolling. Policemen held the press corps behind the barrier while Theo was escorted across the street to a waiting car.

Oscar looked on from the balcony, watching the wolves disperse. They packed up their equipment, smoked their cigarettes, laughed and joked, leaving their sandwich wrappers and drinks cans on the pavement. The traffic was flowing by the courthouse steadily, taking people somewhere he could not imagine, a place he wanted so badly to be. If he thought he had known tiredness before, he was wrong. The waning he felt now in his bones was the most unbearable kind of exhaustion, a persistent lag that rose with him each morning and spread throughout the day. He went down the dim stairway, hoping to see nobody on the way home. It was only when he was away from the courthouse and the jousting of the lawyers that he could remember Iris for the person she was, not just a victim or a name in a file. The more everyone talked about the facts of the case, the less she was alive.

For the last few days, he’d sat in the courtroom, willing it to be over. He’d watched an artist making pastel sketches of Eden entering his plea on the first morning, and seen the drawings appear later on the news: badly proportioned, strangely coloured,
like something from an old cartoon. He’d listened to Theo’s lawyers outline their case, describing the events with cold, considered voices: how the plaintiff suffocated his sister, then his mother, as they lay sleeping in their beds in the early hours of the morning of 7th June; how the plaintiff then proceeded to drag his sister through the house later that afternoon, into a detached building outside, whereupon, according to the plaintiff’s own statement, he tried to revive her. ‘The plaintiff believed he could resuscitate the victim by playing organ music, Your Honour,’ the prosecuting barrister had said, and Oscar had watched the reaction of the judge and the jury, their clenched, disbelieving faces.

When it came time for the defence to present their case, Oscar had listened with rising desperation. ‘We do not wish to refute the facts put forth by the prosecution regarding the events of the seventh of June,’ the defence counsel said, ‘but we wish to argue diminished responsibility in this matter, Your Honour, and press for a ruling of voluntary manslaughter.’ Oscar knew that he was going to be called to testify to Eden’s state of mind. Theo’s lawyers had prepared him for it. But as he answered their questions in the crowded court, he couldn’t shake the feeling that his honesty was somehow a betrayal, that he was hurting Iris with every word. He tried so hard not to look at Eden in the dock, knowing the sight of his face in the daylight would send his blood raging. Instead, he kept his eyes on the prosecution table, where Theo sat, slouched with grief, his bald head blotched with eczema, looking thin, and lost, and beaten.

When the defence counsel played the videos, Oscar saw the jurors fidgeting and ruffling their brows at the screen. He answered questions about Iris’s leg, how it had come to be broken the second time, and the sniggers from the gallery turned his stomach.
Mr Lowe? Mr Lowe, can you please answer the question?
His mind kept leaving the room as the defence counsel grilled him about Eden’s ‘behaviour’ and ‘character’ and ‘lifestyle’. They asked if he’d ever suggested to Herbert Crest that Eden suffered
from a condition known as Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and he answered truthfully. But stepping down from the witness box, he felt a sinking in his gut. What use was the truth to anyone now?

On the third day, the defence had called a leading neurosurgeon to show the jury the scale of Eden’s delusions and, later, the prosecution had been allowed to cross-examine her. It was unsettling to hear Theo’s lawyers lending credibility to Eden’s claims of healing, but Oscar had been told what they were trying to do: it was important to show that Eden had been in full control of his faculties so that the jury would not reduce his crime to voluntary manslaughter.

‘Correct me if I’m wrong here, Dr Reiner,’ the prosecuting barrister had said, ‘but aren’t the uses of hypnosis and music therapy considered to be perfectly acceptable forms of treatment for brain injuries, as well as cancer?’

‘Yes, that’s right, they are, but—’

‘In fact, as a neurosurgeon, you provide information to your patients about both hypnotherapy and music therapy, don’t you?’

The expert didn’t take kindly to being interrupted. She was a thin-lipped woman with her hair pulled tightly in a bun, and every time the barrister interjected she gave an angry little cough and looked at the judge. ‘Yes, I do. But only as part of a full, post-operative treatment plan. I like to give my patients a range of options. I admit, some patients find those kinds of treatments helpful, but I would not consider them to be anything but placebic.’

‘I’m sure those patients would disagree with you.’

‘They might. But they aren’t here.’

The barrister waited. ‘Music has also been proven to benefit sufferers of Parkinson’s disease—hasn’t it?—helping to calm their symptoms? It’s also achieved some positive results with stroke victims and Alzheimer’s patients. Is that correct?’

‘Yes. That’s true. It can have certain temporary effects—
temporary
.’

‘But the defence counsel would have us believe that the plaintiff was acting with diminished capacity in regard to the treatment of Dr Crest and his sister, the victim. Your testimony infers that the plaintiff was perfectly aware of his intentions. He was providing hypnosis and musical therapy, was he not? Perfectly normal forms of post-operative care—not delusions at all.’

The woman paused and cleared her throat. ‘That might be true,’ she said, ‘but hypnosis, music therapy, quite frankly they’re just complimentary treatments. We call them Mind-Body Interventions. They’re no more scientific than dance therapy, or herb therapy, or, well, I was going to say prayer.’

The barrister shook his head. ‘Dr Reiner, forgive me, I was under the impression that numerous clinical trials have proven the efficacy of music therapy. Are you telling me I’m mistaken?’

‘There’ve been clinical trials on music therapy, yes, but they haven’t proven anything except the obvious. Certain types of music can reduce a person’s heart rate or blood pressure—that’s natural. Music helps anxiety. Less stress equals better health. I don’t think we needed a clinical trial to tell us that.’ She scoffed, smirking at the jury. ‘It certainly couldn’t heal a Grade Four brain tumour. And anyone who says so is severely deluded.’

‘Objection, Your Honour. Conjecture.’

‘Sustained. The jury will ignore Dr Reiner’s last comment.’

As the barrister continued to question her, Eden sat grinning in his seat. He seemed thrilled to be the centre of attention, knowing his ideas were being openly discussed, even endorsed. He kept toying with the furls of his fringe, and spreading his fingers on the tabletop, as if he was dreaming up some new musical arrangement, picturing the desk as an organ and the court as a cathedral.

The jury returned a verdict of voluntary manslaughter the following afternoon. Oscar thought he would feel relief at the judge’s decision to hand down a life sentence, but all he felt was a vague
satisfaction in seeing Eden led away by the bailiffs towards a darkened hallway, an expression upon his face like a climber staring up a mountainside.

Afterwards, Oscar didn’t know where to go. He stayed in the courtroom until everyone else had gone, feeling hollowed-out, redundant, wondering if there was enough strength in his legs to carry him home.

On his way out, he saw Theo conferring with his lawyers and a uniformed policeman by the balcony. He went over, and Theo looked at him wearily. ‘They want me to face the rabble out there, Oscar. Make some kind of statement. What do you think?’

He sat down on the bench. Outside the window, the sky held clouds as dense as battleships. ‘If you feed them,’ he said, ‘they’ll keep coming back.’

Theo rubbed at his scalp. ‘Yes. I expect you’re right.’

Now, in the quiet foyer downstairs, Oscar could see Marcus and Jane at the end of the corridor, standing under the tinted hood of a payphone. They were ordering a taxi: ‘We don’t exactly know yet,’ Marcus was saying. ‘Can’t we just tell the driver when he gets here?’

‘Tell them to pull up outside,’ Jane said. ‘There might still be reporters in the car park.’ She looked drawn, her eyes rimmed with darkness. She lifted her fingers slowly when she saw Oscar, leaning her head back against the wall. ‘Are you coming with us?’

‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

‘Somewhere quiet,’ she said. ‘You should eat something, too.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Come with us,’ she said. ‘We miss you, Oscar.’

He gave a narrow smile. ‘Another time maybe.’

Yin came down the stairs behind him then, carrying a coffee from the vending machine. ‘Oscar, hey,’ he said, almost whispering.