Despite George Thorpe being fully aware of my background, and despite the enormous fee I pay him by the hour, I still feel the ridiculous desire to show him that I am not like these other prisoners. That I am better. And I learnt how to do this very easily while working my way up the Artemis ladder. The only way to do it is to treat him like shit.
He stands up to greet me and extends his hand. I ignore it and sit down. ‘I know we’re already on the clock, George, so why don’t you catch me up with what’s happening.’
Good manners are drilled into men like George Thorpe. Public school, Oxbridge, their nannies who raise them and leave them with mother complexes that they take out on their wives – all of these structures hammer home the need for politeness, etiquette, and the right way of doing things. I have disturbed the order. He stumbles slightly as he sits, and I make a point of looking impatient as he opens his briefcase and pulls out some notes.
‘Right well, um, so …’ he trails off as he puts his glasses on and I wonder, not for the first time, whether this man is a shark. I want a shark. I need a shark. When this shit show started to play out, I researched lawyers obsessively and I was told by almost everyone I cared to ask that he was the real deal, with the added benefit of looking like several members of his family ran the British empire at some point. He’s won too many cases to list, he’s got people off on appeal （bad people, people who really should be locked up for life and they walk free because he works every technicality, every weakness in an overworked, tired police officer’s statement, every wavering jury member who is scared of having to live with putting someone in jail）。 So he’s the best. But this sharkier part of him? Well, he’s doing a good job of hiding it and I need for him to taste blood.
George Thorpe goes through the appeal process with me again, reassuring me that we’re on track for the final decision next week. There is a reason that those true crime documentaries eke out the crime part and fade away when it comes to the resulting legal process – it’s complex, boring, demoralising, and mainly consists of waiting around for months. We filed an appeal on day three of my sentence. We filed for bail pending appeal and that went nowhere, I suspect because of the publicity surrounding my case. So now I’ve been in this place for over a year, waiting and festering. There wouldn’t be much tension for the reader picturing me lying on this bed, desperately trying to avoid more group therapy classes where one person tearfully talks about horrific sexual abuse and then three other women accuse her of taking up all the attention.
I haven’t told you much about why I’m in here, have I? That’s because I resent having to. It’s not the injustice of it that holds me back – it’d be fairly moronic to spend my time railing at the unfairness of it all when what I’ve got away with is so much worse – no, it’s the utter banality of it. The motive ascribed to me was pathetic. The act I allegedly committed is one I’d have had to carry out in a fit of rage, with a lack of planning I’d have hated. I’m not Nico. But you can’t use that as a defence, can you? ‘Sorry, m’lud, but when I murder people, I do it with a little more precision, you see.’ Instead I have had to grit my teeth and get through an entire legal process, dragged out for months and months – at great expense. What’s that saying? You make plans and God laughs. I made plans to murder seven people and ended up in jail for the death of someone I didn’t even touch. God would be having a hernia.
CHAPTER TEN
When we were 26, Jimmy met a girl. He’d had girlfriends before, nice, quiet, carried jute bags that had independent book shop logos on them, worked for charities, NGOs, small publishing companies – you know the kind of girl I mean. Glasses, small silver hoop earrings, likes a cup of tea intensely. They were all fine. Fine fine fine. But Jim is so laidback, so kind and well-meaning himself, that these relationships had no real drive to them. There was Louise, who obsessively kept an allotment but never showed a similar passion for anything else and faded away within a year. There was Harriet, who made more progress, sharing a house with Jim and some uni friends in Balham for a while. Their breakup was so painless it was barely noted （by me）。 I’d been working all hours when she moved out, and by the time we caught up for a drink it seemed like he was completely over it and I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to spend my precious free evening consoling him over a woman whose face I could no longer quite picture.
His next girlfriend was Simone, and I thought she might have been the one. She was a gallery curator and wore interesting （interesting just means angular） jewellery and brogues in a variety of colours. She was a serious person, they all were. But she liked my sense of humour and was very relaxed about the long and sometimes blurry friendship I shared with her boyfriend. Importantly, she seemed to really like Jimmy, and talked about their future together with none of those embarrassing caveats some women use in order not to scare a man away. They went on weekends away to Norfolk, and adopted a cat. There was talk of buying a flat together. And I got used to Simone, sharing Jimmy with her was no compromise for me. I might have even watched them grow old together with a sense of satisfaction. But Simone had more ambition than I’d guessed at, and she was offered a curating job at some newly opened gallery in New York just as they’d started viewing flats. I think she’d assumed that Jim would pack up his life and move to Brooklyn no questions asked, but he wavered. He’d just started at the Guardian, and couldn’t bear to give up a precious staff job at a paper where he’d always wanted to work. He wouldn’t be able to work at the same level, he’d protested. He’d flounder around as a freelancer, in a city full of them. Simone listened patiently, she countered his worries with options and emphasised how much this move would mean to her, but he grew more and more mulish. Within a week, he was barely communicating with her at all. They carried on in a muted facsimile of their previous lives while she sorted out her visa, sold her furniture and had a leaving party. Jimmy still hadn’t given her a firm no, and I imagine that she thought he might be wavering, just waiting for her absence to become a real, firm thing in his mind before he gave in and followed her to New York. Instead, she flew out on a Saturday, and he sent her a brief email the following Tuesday saying that he couldn’t do it, that he loved her, that he was so sorry. I know this because he sent it to me minutes later, with the subject heading ‘I hate myself’。