Authors: David Thomas
‘You realize, of course,’ Wolf told Tretow, ‘that I could have all the information you possess extracted from you by interrogation whether you like it or not?’
‘Of course, sir,’ Tretow replied. He had no idea who Wolf was, but he knew a powerful man when he saw one. ‘That is the risk I take. But the material you have seen so far is just a small sample of what I can offer. I therefore calculate that it will, in the long run, be easier and more beneficial for you to indulge my very modest requests. I mean no disrespect, sir, but I am surely more use to you as a healthy, fully functioning asset than a broken prisoner.’
Lesser men would have been outraged by Tretow’s presumption, not to mention the intolerable suggestion that the DDR treated its prisoners improperly. Wolf, however, rose effortlessly above such pettiness.
‘Very well,’ he said, ‘I am prepared to consider your proposal. If you produce information that assists the defence of democratic socialism against its capitalist enemies, then you will be suitably rewarded. But if you fail me in any way, I will make it my personal business to see that you receive the maximum punishment that your crimes merit. Are we clear?’
‘Completely.’
‘Good. You will, of course, be kept in solitary confinement for your own protection until we have been able to determine your value to us. Think of this as the merest hint of what awaits you if you have tried to mislead me.’
Tretow spent the next week in a Stasi cell. To his relief, conditions were not as bad as his father’s horror stories had led him to expect. He had to make do with a bare wooden bench for a bed, but his cell had a window, a basin and a proper flushing lavatory. Food was terrible, but regular. After the stress of the past few days and weeks it felt good to relax. He tried hard not to think about his past, or the family he had left behind. Instead he contemplated his future. That a senior official had taken a personal interest in his case was surely a splendid sign. He would soon be able to reinvent himself as a whole new man.
And then he would start to enjoy himself once again.
13
THURSDAY
Samira Khan carried her coffee over to where I was sitting in a cafe, just a couple of minutes from York Magistrate’s Court. She sat down, opened her briefcase and pulled out a few sheets of stapled A4 paper.
‘They did your brother’s post-mortem yesterday and we were emailed a copy of the report overnight. Do you want to hear about it? I’m afraid it’s not particularly pleasant.’
‘No, I don’t imagine it is,’ I said, glancing up at my lawyer. ‘But go on, tell me …’
‘I won’t give you all the technical jargon, but he died of exsanguination, which means he bled out and—’
‘I know what it means,’ I interrupted sharply.
‘Sorry, I wasn’t sure how much—’
‘It’s OK, go on.’
She looked back at the papers. ‘He lost roughly half of all the blood in his body, more than two and a half litres.’
‘A paint can,’ I said, automatically. ‘Two and a half litres is a standard decorator’s paint can. Imagine what it would be like to spill one of them … every last drop.’ I drifted back to the house that night and as I spoke again, I was barely conscious of Khan’s presence. ‘There were puddles of it … splashes … There was blood everywhere. Even my spaghetti was stained with blood.’
She cleared her throat self-consciously: ‘There were twenty-one stab wounds, some of which were inflicted after he had died. The pathologist described it as an exceptionally violent, even frenzied assault. And there were almost no defensive wounds on your brother’s body, just a couple of cuts on his hands, indicating that he was taken completely by surprise. Whatever happened, it came out of the blue … like a tornado from a cloudless sky.’
‘Jesus!’
‘The point is, there’s no getting away from the fact that all the evidence points at your wife. We can’t base our defence on arguing that she didn’t do it. We have to look at why she did it, and what state she was in at the time.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I know it looks bad for her. I was the one who found her. But I can’t—’
Khan tilted her head slightly to one side as a gesture of sympathy: ‘Look, I think it’s wonderful that you’re so loyal to her. But you have to think about what’s really best for her. And that means that you have to accept what she did and try to come to terms with it. There are people who can help you.’
‘Thanks, but the last thing I need right now is some kind of counsellor, asking me how I feel.’
She straightened up and held my gaze for a moment. ‘All right. How much did Mr Iqbal tell you about today’s hearing?’
‘Not much.’
‘It’s really just a matter of deciding what’s going to happen to your wife in the immediate future. We’ll be up in front of a district judge. The police have to give a good reason why they want to hold her for an additional thirty-six hours. This is a murder investigation, so it’s perfectly normal for an extension to be granted. But we’ll be trying to get bail, or, failing that, to have her transferred to a secure psychiatric facility on the grounds of her mental condition, as per section 35 of the Mental Health Act, 1983.’
Despite the state she’d been in on Tuesday night, it was hard to take in the fact that Mariana would probably be locked up in a loony bin. ‘Is she still that bad?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Don’t know, or can’t tell me?’
‘I honestly don’t have a clue. It will all come down to the Forensic Medical Examiner. The judge will probably go along with whatever the FME says, unless we can give him very good grounds to the contrary.’
‘Iqbal said there might be a problem with beds and funding.’
Khan took a sip of her coffee: ‘Well, this is the NHS, you know. Hospital care for mental patients is expensive, particularly secure care. They can get niggly sometimes about money. We’ll do everything we can to make sure she gets treated as well as possible.’
‘Suppose that doesn’t work?’
‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’ Khan slipped the papers back in her briefcase. ‘OK, I’ve got to go and help Mr Iqbal prepare for the hearing. Give me a minute or so, then walk across to the court and sneak into the public gallery. Try to keep a low profile. It’s just possible the CPS might try and kick up a fuss if they see you in there, but I think they’d have a hard time arguing you’re not even allowed to set eyes on your own wife. Oh, that reminds me.’ She smiled at me for the first time that morning: ‘We’ve put in a request for you to be able to visit her, either in the police station, or any other location to which she might be taken. On compassionate grounds alone, I think we’ve got a reasonable chance of success.’
14
The court was one of those imposing, red-brick, late-Victorian buildings that might equally well be a museum, a town hall or an old grammar school. A man wearing a pair of dirty grey tracksuit trousers and a battered leather jacket was sitting on the flight of steps that led up to the entrance. He was drinking a bottle of cider wrapped in a plastic shopping bag.
I went past an airport-style security check to a long corridor floored in a marble mosaic that ran the full width of the ground floor. Along one side bright purple padded benches were filled with young men in football shirts, cheap anoraks and the same sagging track-suit trousers, and whey-faced women with greasy, pulled-back hair and heavy-bellied T-shirts over their stretch leggings. They looked at me with cold, flat stares as I walked by feeling unexpectedly out of place in the suit and tie I had naïvely imagined were appropriate court attire. This wasn’t a place, they seemed to be saying, for the soft, spoilt, middle-class likes of me.
On the other wall were two red doors, maybe thirty feet apart. Their upper panels were glazed and the word ‘SESSIONS’ was etched on the glass just as ‘SALOON BAR’ might be in a pub of the same vintage.
Mariana’s hearing was taking place in the right-hand court. I pushed on the door, slipped in as quietly as possible and sat down on one of the several curved lines of carved, graffiti-covered wooden benches at the back of the court that served as the public gallery. At the far end of the room, on a raised dais beneath a carved panel of the royal coat of arms sat the district judge, with his clerks and stenographer directly in front of him at floor level. Opposite them were the benches for the opposing teams of prosecution and defence lawyers. Between the public gallery and the lawyers, directly in line with the judge, stood the dock. It was contained within a plexiglass surround, which also enclosed the entrance to a set of stairs that led downwards, presumably to cells in the basement.
Mariana’s legal process began without any grand ceremony, just a shuffling of legal personnel and a sudden flash of dull gold that caught my eye and made me turn towards the dock as she was led up the stairs to take her place behind the plexiglass. Her lank, unwashed hair was drawn back into a ponytail. Her head was down and I only saw a glimpse of the side of her face, drawn and grey-skinned, with an expression of exhausted, drained indifference that made her look barely more alive than Andy’s bloodless corpse. She had the same dull, non-responsive expression that I’d seen on the night of the killing, as though that old wives’ tale had come true: the wind had changed and she’d been stuck with it. With her dead eyes and her grimy, shapeless, police-issue clothes she looked little different and certainly no better than the women sitting in the corridor outside, and I wanted to shout out to the judge and the lawyers: ‘This isn’t Mariana! It’s not what she’s really like!’
The proceedings, once they got underway, were more like a low-key planning meeting between fellow professionals than the kind of courtroom drama I’d been expecting. Iqbal didn’t bother asking for bail. It seemed that the judge had already received a copy of the FME’s report and was satisfied that Mariana was a suitable case for hospital treatment. There was then a brief debate about the practical issues that both Iqbal and Khan had described to me, and the Yorkshire Centre for Forensic Psychiatry was suggested and mutually agreed on.
Throughout all this Mariana said nothing and showed no signs of being aware of anything that was said about her. Her body might have been in the courtroom, but her mind was a million miles away.
Almost as an afterthought, when the secure unit issue had been settled to everyone’s satisfaction, the clerk of the court asked Iqbal whether there was any indication of his client’s likely plea in the event of a trial.
‘Oh, she will be pleading not guilty,’ he said, as if that were a matter of course.
The clerk nodded and made a note. The whole thing looked to be done and dusted and then, without the slightest warning, Mariana suddenly stood up straight and very loudly said, ‘I am guilty!’
Iqbal looked in horror at Mariana, then turned at once to the judge. ‘I assure you, sir, that we will not be making a guilty plea. As you can see, my client is very distressed and not at all in her right mind.’
‘I am guilty!’ Mariana repeated. ‘It was all my fault … all my fault …’ She shook her head from side to side, muttering under her breath. It was unbearable to watch, and a palpable sense of unease and embarrassment swept the chamber as the routine, complacent tone of the proceedings was ruptured by this display of raw, unedited pain.
‘Is there a nurse in the court today?’ the judge asked. ‘I really think Mrs Crookham requires immediate medical attention.’
Mariana was led back down the stairs. As she went, she said something in German. First I caught the word ‘
Mädchen
’ – a girl – and then ‘
böses
’. I didn’t know what that meant. But it was the same phrase, ‘
böses Mädchen
’, repeated again and again like a grim, tuneless refrain.
I tried to catch her eye as she was taken away, but either she had no idea that I was there, or she was simply not willing to look in my direction.
When she had gone I sat stunned for a moment, trying to come to terms with what I had seen and heard. There was no escaping the words she had used. Mariana had said, explicitly, that she was guilty.
It took a moment or two to identify the emotion churning away inside me as anger. I felt as though all my trust in Mariana had been betrayed. I had done my utmost to ignore the evidence of my own eyes, and fight the arguments of the police, the lawyers, my business partner – everyone who had tried to tell me there could be no other killer but her. And now she had come down on their side, not mine. She had admitted to killing my brother and made me feel like a fool for ever believing anything else.
In the corridor ouside the court I took out my iPhone and translated the phrase ‘
böses Mädchen
’.
She had been calling herself a naughty, bad or wicked little girl.
‘I’m sorry you had to see all that.’
I looked up. Samira Khan was standing next to me. I shook my head in bemusement: ‘I look at Mariana and I hardly recognize her any more. Part of me is furious with her. Another part feels this huge sense of pity and real sorrow for her, too. I can’t deny what she did any more and that changes everything. I think I always looked on her as a sort of fantasy figure, the perfect woman. And now …’
‘It’s not easy for any woman to be someone else’s fantasy,’ Khan said. ‘She needs to be loved for herself. Somehow you have to try and accept her as she is.’
I nodded but felt nothing. ‘So, she pleaded guilty. I suppose that’s game over,’ I said.
‘No, actually, that’s one thing you needn’t worry about,’ Khan assured me. ‘The clerk was only asking for an indication of how she might plead. It’s just a guideline, really, to let the court know whether we intend to mount a defence at any actual trial. Nothing your wife said had any legal standing. The only thing it did was to confirm the fragility of her mental state. So in a funny sort of way, that actually worked for us.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, there are two lines of argument we can pursue in a case like this. The first is that the defendant is simply not fit to stand trial. At the moment that would certainly be true of your wife, but it will be months before any trial is likely to take place, so I actually hope for her sake that she is much better by then.’